"Strange Gardening" is the best detective game I've played in years. As the new owner of a small store in a quaint Victorian town, I have only three things: a small collection of rare and unidentified plants, an old botany book with only a few entries, and my wits. Using these three, I will solve dozens of small riddles, solve a few big ones, and save the world.

Then I played again, and although I did not save the world, I unleashed unspeakable horrors upon it. Also, this time he killed a man point blank with a plant because 'it was a bit rude.'

Strange Horticulture mostly unfolds over the counter of plant stores. Sometimes they know the name of the plant they are looking for, but most of the time they know little more than that it has red flowers, that it is good for stomach ailments, or that it is a good houseplant to display at a wedding. Sometimes they get the name wrong or only know it in Latin. If they can't remember anything about the plant they are looking for, or even why they came to your store, they may be looking for an herb that will improve their memory.

With the little information I hear from customers, I look over the plants on the shelves and drag them to my desk for a closer look. Then I flip through the pages of my botany book, which has plant names, pictures, and descriptions, to figure out which plants to give to my current customers. Every person who walks into my store poses a tiny little riddle to me, and it is always a pleasure to solve it, thanks to the beautiful, gently moving plants, well-drawn drawings, and elaborate descriptions in my botanical books. Once I've made my best guess, I hand the customer the plant and the game tells me if my guess is right or wrong.

The game is also wonderfully tricky and especially fun as my inventory gradually grows from a few plants to a huge collection of nearly 80 species. My botanical library is filled with new entries, making for a long book of pages to flip through while playing plant detective. Just because a leaf is heart-shaped doesn't mean it's the only plant with heart-shaped leaves, and sometimes I'm even curious about details like the plant's scent, the number of petals, or how a leaf feels when I touch it with my finger.

The drawings in the book are very detailed and nice, but usually do not depict the entire plant. Sometimes only the leaves are depicted and not the flowers, or, even more curiously, only a cross section of a stem or bulb, which bears little resemblance to the actual complete plant. It takes time and meticulous attention to drag a plant under the microscope to stare at it and read the description carefully, but it is incredibly satisfying when you succeed in identifying the plant.

There is a small punishment for telling someone the wrong plant. If you fail three times in the same day, you lose your sanity Lovecraft-style and have to play a short mini-game to undo it (progress is not lost). But even that small deterrent is not necessary. Because identifying plants correctly is so much fun, I am more disappointed in myself when I get it wrong than any penalty the mini-game gives me.

At the same time you are helping customers in the store, a large map is spread out on your desk, and you can click on it to visit places. Exploring the map is usually the result of receiving a letter from the postman, finding a forgotten note in a desk drawer, or receiving a mysterious message after closing the store each night. The map is the other half of the Strange Horticulture detective experience, where you decipher clues and discover the location of new plants and events.

Map puzzles are not as difficult as identifying plants, but the puzzles are still creative and varied. As the game progresses, new tools become available and various ways to discover hidden locations are unlocked. Midway through Strange Horticulture, an alchemy system is also introduced, allowing players to identify and mix multiple plants in a laboratory to unlock even more mysteries.

One of my favorite moments was when a woman came into the store and handed me a note from her husband saying he had found a rare mushroom in the woods. After examining the note and the map, I figured out where her husband had collected the mushroom, so I brought one back to the store. A few days later, the woman came back and told me that her dumb husband had gotten sick from eating those mushrooms. Did I have a cure?

I happened to find (by solving multiple completely unrelated puzzles) a list of five mushrooms, the symptoms caused by eating them, and a cure for each. So I set about the task of first finding the names of the mushrooms that the dummy had eaten, and then going through the mushroom section of the book to see which plant would cure the dummy.

It was difficult. I wasn't entirely sure if my identification was correct, so I had to resort to ruling out all the other mushrooms in the collection and their cures. When I finally narrowed it down to one potential treatment, I handed it to my worried wife. When I was told the correct answer to the game, I literally threw my hands up in the air and rejoiced. I felt like a veritable Sherlock Holmes, even though I had just peeked into a mushroom to cure a man's stomach cramps.

Besides customers looking for herbs to cure poor eyesight, relieve stomach cramps, or induce sleep, there are others who repeatedly visit the store with darker and grander purposes. There is a mysterious dark presence there, slowly growing in power and threatening the land. Some of the characters you meet want to banish it to the darkness; others want to control it, kill it, or worship it as a god.

In this story, choices that lead to divergence come from time to time. One hunter came to my store and said he wanted to confront the beast of darkness and destroy it. However, a few days earlier, a cultist had visited me and suggested that I give the hunter a plant that would weaken him instead. The librarian, the occultist, and the mysterious hooded woman with the mask had their own agendas, and likewise I had to choose which side to side with and which to betray. The dialogue (text, not narration) is excellent, written as skillfully and carefully as the descriptions in a botanical illustrated book.

And there are all sorts of satisfying and laborious tasks to play through. Books, maps, letters, notes full of clues, magnifying glasses, and other items can be dragged around, placed on desks, or stored in openable desk drawers. Plants can be rearranged on shelves or watered with a small watering can. At the end of the day, I found myself organizing the new plants I had acquired that day, keeping my desk tidy, putting everything in its proper compartment in the drawer, and closing it up. As if I really do run a plant store (and detective work) and want to keep things neat and tidy. It sits (and naps) on the counter. It purrs happily when you pet it.

You can automatically label correctly identified plants, but I prefer to type the labels myself. Early in the first game, a guy had a bad feeling about a plant and dropped it off." Bad plant." I wrote it on a red label and stuck it on a pot of flowers. A few hours later, I found the same description on the note and was able to find it right away. I wish I could be as organized in real life as I am in this little plant store.

I have played "Weird Gardening" three times now (the first game took about 7 hours). Each time I made different choices and experienced three different endings (there are at least eight). In one ending, all of the characters in Strange Horticulture survived. In another ending, several died, one lost his sanity, and in the third ending, one man died simply because he was disrespectful to me and I decided to poison him. I regret nothing

The plants and how to identify them remain the same in subsequent playthroughs, but the alchemical concoctions brewed by choice vary, and the fate of the characters changes dramatically. I thoroughly enjoyed each playthrough and intend to play it again. I am quite enamored with "strange gardening" and want to discover all the endings there are. That's what a good detective does.

And while I love the main storyline of witchcraft, demons, and obsessed cultists, I'm just content to study the beautiful flowers, herbs, and mushrooms, flip through the botanical catalogs I'm growing, and put bright little labels on everything I correctly identify. Perhaps people think I am the owner of a small plant store where I solve puzzles. But I know the truth. I am the world's best plant detective. And you really shouldn't be rude to me.