Strange Antiquities is a perfect sequel that sent my witchy heart aflutter

There's beauty in simplicity. While I love games that push me to my limits, sometimes curling up with a hot chocolate (pumpkin spice at this time of year, of course) and playing a good ol' visual novel is exactly what I need. I recently delved back into the World of Darkness with Vampire: The Masquerade - Reckoning of New York, followed by a brief stint brewing warm drinks in Coffee Talk. All of this, however, was in preparation for Strange Antiquities, the highly anticipated follow-up to Bad Viking's puzzle game turned detective story, Strange Horticulture. It's been three years since we last pet Jupiter the cat and tinkered around with potentially lethal leafy oddities, and a part of me wondered how Antiquities would set itself apart from its predecessor without suffering from feature bloat.

Yet Strange Antiquities isn't just more Strange Horticulture. Putting the obvious difference between artifacts and plants aside, it feels like a fully realized version of its predecessor. There's now an index full of scientific terms (I think?), specialist books to consult, more ways to interact with objects, and the ability to 'feel' something's aura - if it's giving you the chills, it's probably bad.

The game's map collection has been expanded, too, allowing you to visit Undermere's nooks and crannies and collect new artifacts, provided you're clever enough to put the clues together, of course. There's that dopamine hit when you discover something new; a click in your desk can lead to a hidden drawer, or an expedition into a cellar can end in a new acquisition for the store. There's always enough to keep you going despite the game's relative simplicity.

I ask the Bad Viking duo, John and Rob Donkin, why they chose to make a sequel when the original was such a tight, sharp, and complete-feeling experience. "To be honest, it's because people wanted more of it!" says Rob with a laugh. "[Horticulture] is quite a short game, and I think we pitched it about right where people got to the end of it, loved it, and wanted more. We thought we'd close the book on the plant chapter, but decided to open a new chapter and do something a bit different, but keep it in the same world with the same style of gameplay."

"We wanted to extend the 'Strange' universe basically," John continues. "Antiquities were pretty high up the list, and it just felt like a natural progression for the game. Another reason is that, in this industry, it's very, very hard to make a new IP and have it be successful. We were successful with Strange Horticulture, so it made business sense to make another one, and then expand on [what Horticulture did]. We wanted to take all of the things people loved about Strange Horticulture and improve it and add more depth to it, like adding more detective work. People loved exploring the map, so we've added more maps - let's just go a bit bigger."

Speaking of sleuthing, it certainly feels like there's a lot more detective work in Antiquities. There's the addition of the chonky index and specialist tomes, which you'll have to flick back and forth between to identify items. Oftentimes, your patrons will use colloquial terms for their curio of choice, or they simply won't know the name at all, so you'll have to rifle through all of your ancient texts to work out what they're after. There's a lot more deduction involved here, with the ability to inspect items closely adding another layer of complexity to Horticulture's largely visual identification. I ask the brothers why they chose to dig deeper into this specific element of the gameplay.

Rob describes the system as more "intentional. You have to go looking for what the clue might tell you; information isn't just given to you." "There's a lot more detail in there," John agrees. "We also have the index, which I think really amplifies the detective work. With Strange Horticulture, most of the time we gave you the name of the plant, then you'd go to your book and find out what you're looking for. But now, quite a lot of the time, we don't give you the name, you just have the story - the conversation with the person that comes to you. It just adds more layers to it.

"When we made Strange Horticulture, we didn't know we were making a detective game," the pair says almost in unison. "Rob came [around] and was like 'oh I've thought of this idea for a game. I saw an advertisement for a horticulture company, so Strange Horticulture is about running an occult plant shop,' and I was like, 'we're making that,'" John recalls. "We pulled bits from old projects that we'd been making, like a map from a board game we'd been prototyping and the setting from a point-and-click adventure game - that was Undermere. So we just made that game and then someone else was like 'this is one of the best detective games in years,' and we were like 'oh yeah, we made a detective game!'"

As someone who is very much in her #detectiveera, Strange Antiquities is exactly what I wanted from a sequel to Horticulture. It takes everything that the original did well and expands on it, forcing you to make sometimes questionable decisions, while letting you revel in the dopamine rush of successfully identifying an object against all odds. As spooky season draws ever closer, I can't recommend Strange Antiquities enough - it's literally the perfect game for a chilly autumn night by candlelight.

Strange Antiquities is available on Steam right now, so book your ticket to Undermere and get ready to spend your days petting Jupiter (and also identifying stuff). Just make sure you dodge all of the crows, though - I hear there are a lot of them in town these days.