Strange Antiquities

You know... I'm gonna say it. Not as good as Strange Horticulture. There are so many plates to spin that sometimes the puzzles feel less like something to solve and more like making a poorly educated guess until you hit the right item. Especially before you unlock the lens, which... [spoiler] the first few times I clicked on the flower amulet, nothing changed about it so I assumed I'd have to get something else to make it fit later. It only took until I was physically unable to progress the game before I looked it up, clearly missing something, and realized it just hadn't worked when I tried it before. [/spoiler] So you can go several in-game days without having the tools necessary to even guess at certain puzzles just because the controls occasionally don't trigger properly. That feels kinda bad and isn't a problem I had with Strange Horticulture. THAT BEING SAID. Despite my gripes with it, I still think it's a game well worth playing. You might need to take a break from it when it pisses you off, but the story is good and the puzzles that work REALLY work. Plus the art is much improved from SH and god is it beautiful. Same style as SH but with more polish.

Such a cute original concept that keeps you wanting more! Love it sm. Definitely a good game for you if you love a little solo whimiscal game to work on.

It's an evolution from its predecessor, sure. But in this case, I didn't want an evolution. I played the first few days and none of the quests were as rewarding as in Horticulture. In my opinion, there are just too many levels to check whether an artifact fits. Example: Customer wants X, but you don't know X. There's an index in the book, telling you that X might be Y. The description of Y says that the artifact may (!) be marked with the symbol for A. You open the other book and search for A. You find A, but there is no artifact with A. Ok, dead end. Open first book again. It tells something about the surface of the artifact. You inspect your inventory. But to inspect the surface, you have to cursor over the complete object because object can have different surfaces. Sounds like a neat idea, but it's incredibly tiresome. In the end, it felt like brute-forcing and accepting the RNG game in case of too many bad guesses was faster than examining all the clues and objects. And that didn't feel rewarding. NB: I played on Steam Deck. Maybe it's easier on computer, but on Steam Deck everything just felt cumbersome. Strange Horticulture was much more rewarding because the hints were…

I absolutely love how cozy this game was I started playing it at 8 and before I knew it, it was 1 in the morning.

Started off okay but about half way through it completely abandons it's own rules and you're left guessing to locate each object.

Loved it so much! Fun story, quirky townies, extremely cool objects and ofc beautiful art style! I felt like a crazy scientist trying to figure it all out haha. Only critique is I found a lot of the vague hints to be too general for the items. Maybe it was my way of thinking that kept locking me up, but sometimes I figure an item out and the hint I was supposed to look for was the most insanely vague stuff ever like "item is made of copper". The gemstone descriptions were so vague to me too. But maybe it was a skill issue, I have no idea.