It's difficult to give this a Not Recommended, because there is nothing fundamentally broken about this game. It's a visual novel where you spend most of your time flicking through a plant reference book, and it takes a few hours to complete.

It didn't really capture me. So much time is spent on the menial tasks that the actual narrative takes a back foot, and ends up very shallow. Everything is exactly as it appears - the story has no real twists besides the ones you pick. You are occasionally asked to make a choice, and most of them are the most banal kind of good vs evil. There are different endings, but the ending is so sudden that a slight variation in the described outcome doesn't feel impactful. You only talk to each character a couple of times, and it's not enough for them to have any kind of meaningful character progression or for you to develop any interest in most of them.

Are the 'game' parts compelling? There are a couple of map puzzles that are satisfying to solve, but few and far between. Most of the actual plant work is not interesting. The game will almost always tell you exactly which plant to pick for a customer. Identifying plants is mostly an exercise in clicking through the book until you find a matching description. Identifying a plant before the moment its needed ends up feeling like a waste of time, because you aren't guaranteed to have the description available until a customer asks for it.

Your experience may vary, but I didn't get anything substantial out of the puzzle elements nor the narrative elements. There is nothing strange about strange horticulture - it lives exactly up to its surface-level description and doesn't go an inch further. I spent the playthrough waiting for a payoff that never appeared, and having finished it once, I'm not likely to go back in.

It's difficult to give this a Not Recommended, because there is nothing fundamentally broken about this game. It's a visual novel where you spend most of your time flicking through a plant reference book, and it takes a few hours to complete. It didn't really capture me. So much time is spent on the menial tasks that the actual narrative takes a back foot, and ends up very shallow. Everything is exactly as it appears - the story has no real twists besides the ones you pick. You are occasionally asked to make a choice, and most of them are the most banal kind of good vs evil. There are different endings, but the ending is so sudden that a slight variation in the described outcome doesn't feel impactful. You only talk to each character a couple of times, and it's not enough for them to have any kind of meaningful character progression or for you to develop any interest in most of them. Are the 'game' parts compelling? There are a couple of map puzzles that are satisfying to solve, but few and far between. Most of the actual plant work is not interesting. The game will almost always tell you exactly which plant to pick for a customer. Identifying plants is mostly an exercise in clicking through the book until you find a matching description. Identifying a plant before the moment its needed ends up feeling like a waste of time, because you aren't guaranteed to have the description available until a customer asks for it. Your experience may vary, but I didn't get anything substantial out of the puzzle elements nor the narrative elements. There is nothing strange about strange horticulture - it lives exactly up to its surface-level description and doesn't go an inch further. I spent the playthrough waiting for a payoff that never appeared, and having finished it once, I'm not likely to go back in.