An intriguing pitch, The Botanist is a comic that boasts a cutesy short story sequence with you turning the pages using the Playdate’s crank, along with using other interactive elements that help progress it along. I’ll ignore the money-to-experience ratio, as I went in expecting some loss in that department. At 8 dollars, 10 minutes long, and with a static story, the game has a low-replayability and little investment potential. That’s all good and well, the problem is when you actually see what it has to offer.

The art is fine, the interactivity is lower than it should have been, in scope and creativity, but the true nail in the coffin is the completely incomprehensible “story”. That is, there is no story, no narrative, no message, no real characters. There’s thousands of stories that can and have been told without dialogue, and done in much less time than The Botanist has. The issue is that it’s not really a comic, moreso a loose collection of images with vague connections to each other. I love arthouse, minimalist games with outside the box methods of communicating information and involving the player. Though The Botanist claims to do this, it feels more like a bait and switch, or to be more fair, an unfinished game altogether. Some more time in the oven with a clear intention laid out and implemented would have made me much more receptive to what we got.