I Missed One...

In all the excitement about September new releases I forgot one!  The follow-up to the plant-filled mystery game Strange Horticulture arrived on September 17th.  This time around you're dealing with a vast array of magical objects in Strange Antiquities.  Strange Horticulture was recently featured as a freebie on Epic, so hopefully more people learned about and got to enjoy solving the mysteries of Undermere.  I've had a few hours to play around with Strange Antiquities and even though there aren't any plants, the gameplay remains very much in the same vein.

Jupiter and the storefront in Strange Antiquities.

Strange Antiquities starts off much the same way that Strange Horticulture did--a family member needs help tending the shop and you get to play that role.  The major difference this time around is that the items in question are an array of bizarre (and sometimes grotesque) magical items.  Luckily there's a handy tome filled with vague, semi-helpful descriptions to help you identify them.  There's also a fun, cute new shop cat named Jupiter to occasionally pet and make you feel better about the disgusting mummified hand that is sitting on a shelf.

The gameplay has been pretty similar to Strange Horticulture--townfolk visit the shop looking for a magical item to help them with their current issues and it's your job to correctly identify a totem, pendant...or other magical oddity to serve their needs.  On top of this there's also a mysterious illness impacting the villagers that seems to have some sort of dark and ominous source.  Every day a new mystery card appears and you can opt to try to puzzle out the clues to unlock even more items for the shop.  The shop itself also contains a number of different puzzles that hide new objects and information that can be used to help with the local mystery.

If you haven't checked out either Strange Horticulture or Strange Antiquities, I would recommend giving them a try.  There's some light-to-medium puzzle solving and a dark, mystery story to solve.  It's a great casual/mostly relaxing game with lots of replayability.