Downton Abbey meets Gardeners’ World in what is essentially an Escape Room style puzzle video game.

To me, that’s the pitch of Botany Manor and whilst maybe that’s far too strange sounding I feel it hits all the points of how I’d explain the game more fully.
Botany Manor is set around 1890, as you can expect from the title you spend time in and around a manor. As a location, it’s quaint, colourful and pleasant to be around but is also much like a National Trust building you might visit somewhere in England.
It has all those positive aspects, but it also feels quite pompous and for me a little overbearing in areas. This tone is amplified by the little bits of story scattered throughout in various letters and other reading materials. It is a setting and style I know many will find enjoyable but I find fairly difficult to mesh with.

That’s the Downton Abbey part.
The Gardener’s World part, well really that’s just me throwing the first obviously gardening themed television show title that comes to mind - the Botany part of Botany Manor.
The main driving force of the story is that your protagonist Arabella Greene is a retired botanist who is exploring her old manor and of course gardens to fill out a blank herbarium by (re?)discovering the ideal situation for these, fantastical (fictional) plants to grow and by the end get a book deal out of it.
This gimmick does feel a little conceited, there’s a lot of hand waving in how the things in her own house are set up for these wild and magical plants, why no one is there but it’s recently lived in.
It is, as you may expect, not a barrier to enjoying the puzzles themselves but another small fence that I personally found hopping over to engage with the story a little difficult.
One thing that I did find intriguing that is sewn throughout the story is Arabella’s difficulties in getting a book deal and simply put, how much harder being a woman in that time period was, to even be listened to and respected.

So Botany Manor takes place in a manor and about botany. Exactly what it says on the tin.
Gameplay wise your objective is to fill out the blank pages of that previously mentioned herbarium.
Each segment of the house gives you things to interact with and some conveniently placed tables that include pots, soil and a set of drawers for the seeds you have found.
I’ve called these plants magical and fantastical because although things can grow in all sorts of circumstances the gamification and simplifying means what you grow is less about slowly feeding, waiting and pruning and more about the locations and the environments plants may grow in and recreating them.
To keep things exciting it may be a plant grows near a volcano, perhaps in lightning storms or together with specific animals.
I won’t give too many more details than that because I’d be ruining the thrust of the game.

The puzzles and the structure of the game is where my escape room comparison comes in.
Clues and items for each of the plants you must grow to fill the pages of the herbarium are found by searching rooms, occasionally interacting with parts of them to obtain key items and throughout the length of the game solving these will gain you access to more parts of the manor and its surrounding gardens, by either keys to unlock doors or revealing paths to connect areas in an enjoyable labyrinthine way.
The tension isn’t there, unlike an Escape Room there is no risk of losing outside of getting stuck, bored and closing down the game but whilst I played Botany Manor it felt a lot like other games I had played in the past.

As an aside, it reminded me of the MC2games series of Escape Room puzzlers, but with more budget giving it a slightly clearer story and nicer presentation.
Some of those games I have reviewed here on backloggd and although I don't rate some of them super highly, do enjoy them for what they are and the shorter, respectful, amount of time they want from me. Enough to scratch an itch.

Compared to these other games though, mechanically is where Botany Manor has a few issues for me. First off is the size of the place, it’s a large English Manor house so it is somewhat expected, I do also applaud the almost Dark Souls-like shortcut unlocking that makes traversing a little easier but even with that, for my liking, there is too much running back and forth.
The size of the setting and the annoyance of navigating is mostly due to the poor inventory and note taking management the game has.
Each page of the herbarium you can collect clues for, once you have selected the correct clues the description of the plant will change, filling out the story a little more.
The herbarium itself has maps which are nice and also a page on clues collected, but, significantly has no notes outside of where you found these clues to what they said.
If you find a pattern or numbers that you realise are useful elsewhere then you better have your own blank page to fill out in the real world because Arabella must have photographic memory as she doesn’t bother.
It’s a simple issue solved by real life note taking and that is not something I am opposed to typically, but in this setting, the amount of information surrounded by fluff, and with a blank notebook in-game hand it created a barrier to my enjoyment, a false way to lengthen the game and simply another thing that took me out of the setting.

The further you get into the game, the larger area you have. It is kind enough to not make you run back and forth throughout the whole house but this “escape room” ends up feeling a little more like an escape warehouse which might sound cool until I say that the size change does not mean the difficulty or even the amount of clues to find increase at the same rate.

One final complaint as a footnote is that interacting with items, the simple form of clicking to pick up and place down, is oddly too free. You can put things down anywhere which could cause you to forget where they are. This was not an issue I came into, but I did have a bug where I picked up one item, placed it on a shelf next to another and they became fused and then suddenly non-interactive. A minor bug like this would usually not be worth mentioning but that item, it was key to one of the final plants to finish the game and I was almost soft locked.
Botany Manor only has a single save and no chapter restarts, so if I could not unlock this fusion of items I would have to start the entire game again.
Thankfully with some extremely janky movement I was able to pick the item up again (clipping through a wall outside of where I could normally touch it) and finish the game.
I held off on putting down my thoughts about this title too fast because as you can imagine the annoyance and the time wasted on out bugging a bug soured me further. Now I can look back and laugh but it’s another small mark against the title as a whole.

Botany Manor is a pleasant time, the puzzles are perhaps too easy but fun and creative, it’s a fantastic title to have as a part of game pass but between some very strange design choices and a story and setting I did not gel with I didn’t really find that I enjoyed myself more here than I have playing much cheaper - at asking price and budget - equivalents on Steam.

There’s something you see online often that has become a parody: “Nintendo, hire this man”.
Typically this will be alongside Mario in a “photo-realistic” latest Unreal Engine world and have virtually no artistic merit what-so-ever.

However, I find myself thinking that stupid line, or at least thinking that I wish Nintendo would do more things like this.

Vikavoltius is a fan-made shmup in the style of Prodius and its ilk. Where instead of a spaceship you are controlling the Bug/Electric type Pokémon from Sun and Moon: Vikavolt.
The game is pay what you want and really it is so very short (1 stage) that I wouldn’t blame someone for paying nothing at all.

The single stage has you shooting down other Pokémon that fly in different patterns, some that fire projectiles and finishing off with a boss that I won’t spoil but I am sure there are pictures all over the page (it looks like a UFO).

Quantity there is not, but quality is where Vikavoltius makes you feel like the experience was a good use of your time. The sprites are fantastic, the remixed classic themes are brilliant and the simple but elegant power up system is enjoyable enough to do a small handful of runs without being bored to tears by the repetition of a single level.

It’s a shame there isn’t more as I feel there are a few other good Pokémon that could be transferred to a shmup and fit in perfectly.
Vikavolt themselves evolves from Charjabug and I’d love a road based level to start with, for reference it looks a bit like a bus.

I’ll finish as I started though. This may be a short-sweet proof of concept more than anything but I do miss having these mini-games from Nintendo themselves. DSiWare is long gone but Pokémon loves to shit out all sorts of other stuff and has done many other genres in a fuller form but in a much lower quality than Vikavoltius.

Cosy, wholesome, zen. I don’t outright hate these terms when discussing video games but as discussed on The Computer Game Show trying to use those terms as a genre title feels, incorrect, possibly disingenuous.
Horror is a genre, not “scary”, the decision of what something feels like is up to its audience.
It may sound redundant but acting as if cosy is a genre is the equivalent to filing a game under “fun”.

I have definitely used these words to describe games in the past. I am a fan of having games that I can relax with, zone out a little and not feel pressured or even stressed.
A Little to the Left aims for a feeling of being cosy, simple and just nice. Organising varying objects into a tidy manner as a simple puzzle, while along the way introducing a long-haired white cat to add to the everyday wholesome feeling the game is aiming for, using this cat as a game mechanic to either mess with your tidying or as a theme to the puzzles.

I love cats, but I feel that, let’s just call them “cat people”, end up elevating a lot of things that include cats to a pedestal they do not deserve.
This again just added to a feeling which may make me sound miserable, of being told I should like something which had me push back against it.
I will decide whether the game is wholesome, not the game itself.

As far as the organising and puzzles, A Little to the Left fails to do either in a way that really landed with me.
In terms of organising, the feeling is enjoyable for a moment and quickly repetitive. These items other than feeling quite “everyday” don’t really do anything else but act as icons, there is no story within them unlike Unpacking - the game I would say really pushed this subgenre.

The puzzles again are repetitive, organise by size, organise in a colour gradient, make something symmetrical, there is really not much else to them other than this.
Once you understand the game’s language, what it decides is organised, you can solve each puzzle within seconds, maybe replaying for different solutions but quickly moving on.

Another issue with the puzzles themselves is the interactions of simply picking up and putting stuff down never feels precise enough and also doesn’t feel marked out enough to do quickly.
Many times I would have items in the right order but the game had me fiddle with the items until lined up perfectly and that in my eyes, doesn’t feel relaxed or cosy, it feels annoying and like busy work. I will also add here that one puzzle the game would not allow me to solve even though I had everything correct (I ended up using the hint and then guides to check) but because it wouldn’t progress I spent minutes fiddling for no gain.

Sadly repetition is the biggest flaw of A Little to the Left and the finale really ramps this to a stage where I found myself saying “I don’t care about this cat”.

Perhaps there is an argument that I should have played this game in shorter bursts and to a degree I agree with that assessment. However, this further enforces the final point I’d like to make about this game. It’s in the wrong format.

This title is on PC and all the modern consoles, and outside of the Switch and maybe the Steam Deck I don’t think this fits. It has “mobile game” written all over it and whilst I don’t intend that to be an insult it does make it feel wrong playing on a bigger screen.
Multiple stages with tiny puzzles and little in the way of connective thread throughout them just reminds me of the classic games on iOS such as Angry Birds, Cut the Rope or even Monument Valley although that feels more narratively driven.

A Little to the Left is a Little Disappointing.

Cosy, wholesome, zen. I don’t outright hate these terms when discussing video games but as discussed on The Computer Game Show trying to use those terms as a genre title feels, incorrect, possibly disingenuous.
Horror is a genre, not “scary”, the decision of what something feels like is up to its audience.
It may sound redundant but acting as if cosy is a genre is the equivalent to filing a game under “fun”.

I have definitely used these words to describe games in the past. I am a fan of having games that I can relax with, zone out a little and not feel pressured or even stressed.
A Little to the Left aims for a feeling of being cosy, simple and just nice. Organising varying objects into a tidy manner as a simple puzzle, while along the way introducing a long-haired white cat to add to the everyday wholesome feeling the game is aiming for, using this cat as a game mechanic to either mess with your tidying or as a theme to the puzzles.

I love cats, but I feel that, let’s just call them “cat people”, end up elevating a lot of things that include cats to a pedestal they do not deserve.
This again just added to a feeling which may make me sound miserable, of being told I should like something which had me push back against it.
I will decide whether the game is wholesome, not the game itself.

As far as the organising and puzzles, A Little to the Left fails to do either in a way that really landed with me.
In terms of organising, the feeling is enjoyable for a moment and quickly repetitive. These items other than feeling quite “everyday” don’t really do anything else but act as icons, there is no story within them unlike Unpacking - the game I would say really pushed this subgenre.

The puzzles again are repetitive, organise by size, organise in a colour gradient, make something symmetrical, there is really not much else to them other than this.
Once you understand the game’s language, what it decides is organised, you can solve each puzzle within seconds, maybe replaying for different solutions but quickly moving on.

Another issue with the puzzles themselves is the interactions of simply picking up and putting stuff down never feels precise enough and also doesn’t feel marked out enough to do quickly.
Many times I would have items in the right order but the game had me fiddle with the items until lined up perfectly and that in my eyes, doesn’t feel relaxed or cosy, it feels annoying and like busy work. I will also add here that one puzzle the game would not allow me to solve even though I had everything correct (I ended up using the hint and then guides to check) but because it wouldn’t progress I spent minutes fiddling for no gain.

Sadly repetition is the biggest flaw of A Little to the Left and the finale really ramps this to a stage where I found myself saying “I don’t care about this cat”.

Perhaps there is an argument that I should have played this game in shorter bursts and to a degree I agree with that assessment. However, this further enforces the final point I’d like to make about this game. It’s in the wrong format.

This title is on PC and all the modern consoles, and outside of the Switch and maybe the Steam Deck I don’t think this fits. It has “mobile game” written all over it and whilst I don’t intend that to be an insult it does make it feel wrong playing on a bigger screen.
Multiple stages with tiny puzzles and little in the way of connective thread throughout them just reminds me of the classic games on iOS such as Angry Birds, Cut the Rope or even Monument Valley although that feels more narratively driven.

A Little to the Left is a Little Disappointing.