Brief, light, pleasant, Botany Manor has a fantastic set up and delivers on that premise but lacks any ambition to go beyond and become more than the sum of its parts.

Being given a book of blank pages and a gorgeous mansion to explore is intensely charming. Each page represents a flower with unique conditions for blossoming, which you're tasked with first deducing and then recreating within the grounds of the manor.

The puzzles have an escape room feel, key information is scattered around in notes and pages that you must cross reference until you puzzle out what your little sprout needs to grow. These puzzles are all delightful, each flower is fickle in its own whimsical way, but the logic is rooted in real principles of botany to help guide your intuition. Light, soil, temperature and even sound are the lingua franca of the floral world.

There's a feature to place relevant clues on a flower's page, which then "lock in" once you have the full set; it's usefulness is middling, you can't view information remotely and the puzzles don't have much overlap anyway. This feels like a half-hearted gesture at Return of the Obra Dinn's genius information managing system.

As is typical for this type of silent first person indie game the story and background must be inferred rather than shown directly. This is done through notes and objects that have varying degrees of subtlety regarding the themes of the game. This is where the game falters for me, not that I dislike the themes or feel that they're not important or emotional, but rather that the game is lacking a watershed moment that ties gameplay and narrative together as a cohesive Experience.

That said, ultimately it's a short enjoyable game that I didn't regret my time playing, so maybe you won't either.