Strange Horticulture
Worth it · Strategy · 2022
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $15.99, a BANGER if it drops to $9.83.
- Length
- 5.7h
- Value
- $2.81/hr
- Reviews
- 94% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 512 MB display memory, 1 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Strange Horticulture is an occult puzzle game in which you play as the proprietor of a local plant store. Find and identify new plants, pet your cat, speak to a coven, or join a cult. Use your collection of powerful plants to influence the story and unravel Undermere’s dark mysteries.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $4.79, set in November 2024. It has been discounted 48 times in the 5 years tracked here, typically at 50 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks. It becomes a BANGER at $9.83, a level the record has reached 44 times.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 84 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Enigma of Fear ($20.99, scores 91) beats it on value, while it beats The Case of the Golden Idol ($17.99, scores 72).
The press gave it 83; the people who bought it give it 94 percent. An 11-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data puts 51 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 9 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written July 2023 to August 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,403 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 71 percent of the 531 reviews written there were positive, against 94 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 5.7 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
96% start to 51% finishPeople genuinely stick with this one. Steam global achievements
Players
134 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Went into this not expecting much, got addicted almost immediately, Finding the correct plant for each customer is strangely relaxing and getting it right feels very rewarding. At the same time, the writing keeps you interested indicating that disturbing events are happening nearby. Finding new plants, new hints about the unfolding mistery keep the whole experience fresh until the end. It's a short game but worth...
Strange Horticulture is a very nice little indie game, where you take care of and identify (fictional) plants coupled with navigating a grid-based map in a steampunkish/medieval world. It is kind-of a mix of an escape room puzzle game ("how do you deduce the real meaning of this secret message") with some pure logic based puzzles ("cross-checking of plant characteristics, aliases, etc, to narrow down the one I want...
⊰═🕀═⊱≼ Lovecraftian garden ≽⊰═🕀═⊱ 🜂 Positive 🜄 ☉ Gloomy and mysterious atmosphere, which exudes something dark and mystical ... ☉ Interesting puzzles , especially if you like the plant theme and have dreamed of having your own garden or greenhouse ... ☉ Good puzzles , as there was nothing illogical or confusing ... ☉ A cat Hellebore , which you can pet ... And it reacts in a very funny way when visitors arrive ...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Strange Horticulture scores 76/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1574580/strange-horticultureThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 2, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.