NOCLIP Pocket E74 - Fart March - Strange Horticulture

Dangerous podcast grows in the northeast. Keep it secret. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket, and to Fanbruary! We’re back from our time off from the podcast and are diving into games suggested by listeners, the first of which is Strange Horticulture, a plant-based puzzle game that tasks you with identifying supernatural plants and using them to fulfill requests and solve puzzles. That’s the type of description where you’re probably either grabbed by it or not and it exists to fill that particular niche, but I’d say that’s only mostly right. You need to be able to enjoy plant classification as a game mechanic to get the most out of this game, but beyond that, the puzzles are well designed enough to appeal to a very broad spectrum of people. They tend to lean more into the Obra Dinn style of inductive reasoning, requiring you to examine your plants and make inferences given a description of the thing you’re looking for, and keeping that information in your brain to use later as you uncover more pages of your book and more plants to identify. This leans away from the more logic-puzzle style of a lot of dedicated puzzle games and none of them are so difficult that you’ll be held up for too long or too easy as to be a waste of your time. And while this is the biggest selling point if “supernatural plant puzzle game” doesn’t immediately make you want to play it, the presentational elements do a lot of heavy lifting as well. The game maintains a dour atmosphere that helps sell the tone and the visual detail on the plants is impressive, making them look both natural in a group on your shelves and still able to be picked apart as individual species on closer examination. We’re going to be talking about our mild disappointments with the game’s narrative, how much of a positive effect rain sounds can have on a game’s atmosphere and we really put mushrooms in their place. Thank you for joining us again this week! We took some time off and then accidentally took a little more, so Fanbruary is probably going to stretch on into next month, but we’ll make sure we get four listener-suggested games in before moving on to our regularly scheduled programming. Having now played this game, it probably falls a little bit too much into “we would have played this anyway” but we had no idea what it was about before jumping into it, so here we are. Hopefully you enjoyed it as well if you’ve played it, or at least the episode if you’re listening anyway, and we’ll be back next time with an episode on Cursed to Golf!