Undermare is a unique little place. In Bad Viking’s debut game, Strange Horticulture, its inhabitants are caught up in a unique conspiracy of a forest cult aimed at summoning the mystical alarm clock Dendru. Now, in that sequel, Raven’s plot has descended into town. People are afraid to leave the house. bad It’s happening. The precursor of this disease is good news for you – store as a temporary owner of your local Curio Strange ancient timesyou are the first calling port for protective totems, word spells, and enchantments that increase mood. The business is booming.
If you’re new to Viking’s supernatural detective game series, the strange bones (and their born predecessor, the strange gardening) will prevent you from running your shop in a quaint fantasy hamlet. Villagers come to look for certain relics and you need to settle which one to give them. You turn through all-weakened book pages, exploring local areas to find more artifacts and book chapters, dodging the creeping horrors surrounded by holes in your stomach.
On paper, there doesn’t seem to be much room for innovating with strange gardening. Different shops, different artifacts, the same great point-and-click adventure. This is a struggle that is often inherent to mechanically simple genres. As our Amerzone review says, a fresh splash of paint alone can only do that much. My game? Thankfully, after a short time at a private demonstration, my worries were crushed.
I’m quickly being featured alongside customers looking for alternative benefits for Hunter. I turn to the cabinet of curiosity and peer into the strangeness that is being offered. There are bones, rocky ornaments decorated with strange symbols painted on suspicious red liquids, and pendants made from forest animal sculptures. Open a guide to store inventory and think for a while and quickly find the benefits of the hunter. So far, so good.
However, requests become more difficult. Women seek out items that are not listed in my book. Instead, I need to go back to the index. There you have to find descriptors and the items they are associated with (for example, curses are referred to in the siphon of ram) and alternative names for objects. Putting the two together, I give the client her ruling doctrine, and she is happy. I attach a label to it – these are now completely customizable – by the way, they contain alternative names included to save me a few flicks.
A day or so passed, I am introducing a new book from one of the shopkeeper’s quirky academic colleagues. After plated the fact that strange ancients are left in the hands of “apprentice”, she swoos out of the store, leaving behind a gorgeous book filled with new symbols. It will soon become clear that these glyphs will appear in future artifacts, and we will know that we need to translate them so that our customers will receive the right benefits. It’s yet another complexity, but it never becomes frustrating. In fact, it’s one of my favorite new additions to the game easily.
After that I am approached by a gentleman looking for a creepy necklace. It emits a gentle snake-like hiss when raised to its ears. You simply drag a plant under a strange horticultural microscope to examine its habits, but now you can use your senses to analyze the objects more carefully. Again, it’s another layer of complexity for what’s already felt like a bulletproof system on paper.
Exploration is different here too. Because now you can roam the Undermare in your spare time. In strange horticulture, we had to fill in a meter to “explorate the will” by watering the plants or getting the customer’s requests right, but in strange ancient times there are many more opportunities to explore the map. The demonstrations limit me to the village itself, and the nearby Pois just wants to explore.
Recover stolen valuables hidden behind the rotten prison in Undermare, then visit the neighboring winery to recover some artifacts from the basement. Instead of visiting different, often meaningless places and expecting the best places, this new system is more streamlined, but immerses you in the wider world of undermare.
Speaking of meaningless, if things get out of hand, you are now presented with a new recovery system. Like strange gardening, making consistent mistakes during the day will raise the fear inside to the surface and become completely incapacitated. You need to solve puzzle sequences and piece together fragmented minds. This is represented in a series of horticultural stone fragments and is put together to form a seal. In ancient times, the system was replaced by dice rolls, and the correct combination must be rolled to break a series of seals. Rolling the X adds it to the scary meter and ends the game if enough occurs.
It took me a bit of time to grab my head around, but I started to prefer this over the older system. There is an element of opportunity and a higher stakes. This is more exciting than stitching together puzzles. There was also a satisfying “thunk” when the wooden dice hit the panel, and I realized that I needed to think more deeply about myself in more general terms.
When the sun sets on the second day at Undermare, you are given the option. My last patron of the day enters the store and lets me know that her “friends” have a bad habit of stealing her jewels and in order to stop her, she wants to buy a seductive item from her acquaintance that she can steal. This game lets me know that this choice will have more consequences, so will I give her an item to punish or instill fear? The former implies something more dramatic is happening, while the latter appears to release the thief more lightly. I choose the former – how she steals this woman’s thing – and as we disappear into the night, the demonstration approaches. Quite a cliffhanger.
As someone who loved the first game, I had my reservations about whether strange ancients could make themselves stand out. The charm of Andermere certainly seduced me in the first place, but I wasn’t sure if it could carry a sequel. Thankfully, antiques can do well in gardening, enhancing it, adding diversity to item analysis, allowing you to explore its unique world. After just an hour with the bone quot, I am desperate to discover all of its dark secrets. Jupiter needs more pets, Raven needs to deal with, and there are creepy games. Where do you start with the question?
