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!