A game for one to thirteen billion players

I was excited to see a new release in the Roots of Chaos series by Samantha Shannon - but I think picking the audiobook for Among the Burning Flowers was probably a mistake. The Author's Note said you could read this as a starting point to the series, which I appreciated because I only remember the very broad strokes of Priory of the Orange Tree and A Day of Fallen Night - but it opened with an awful lot of names, places and history to get to grips with. I felt like my brain was sliding off the story (which is definitely an issue I've been having with audiobooks lately - likely no fault of the books) and I wasn't really connecting to it or to the characters, so I decided to quit while I was behind.

Strange Horticulture is my favourite video game I've played in the last few years - and, a month or so ago, I played through it a second time with Dave, letting him make the important decisions and thus getting a very different ending to the first time I played it. It was really fun to work through it together, since I'd forgotten nearly all of the puzzles by that time so it was largely new to me again.

So, I was tremendously excited to hear that a sequel was in the works - Strange Antiquities, which came out earlier this month. We started playing it on the day of release and finished it today, 11 days later. We played until after midnight three nights in a row this week, which goes to show how much fun we had with it.

Like in Strange Horticulture, you play someone running an esoteric shop in a town called Undermere. Where the first game was all about plants, this one is all about artefacts - statues, totems, boxes and pendants. Initially, individual customers come into the shop and ask for specific items or for advice on solving a particular problem. Then, you have to consult your book of descriptions and match one to an artefact on the shelves to provide the right item. A central plot of doom and destruction starts to emerge as the game goes on, and there are seven or so decision points where you can send the story in different directions.

I love the aesthetic of the game, and also the gameplay. There's so much variety in the objects and the puzzles, the latter of which are rarely so difficult as to annoy me.

The makers obviously got feedback on the first game, because there are multiple improvements here. There are several different ways in which to identify objects, so that aspect is more interesting and involving. There is more than one map - and they are much easier to navigate than in the first game. The magnifying glass works better and is easier to use, so there's a lot less peering at tiny things on the screen. There's also a better hint system, with staggered clues to lead you to the more difficult answers, if you want to spend less time scratching your head. And the cat is more involved...

All the things I loved about Strange Horticulture are also present and correct, including a fair few of the characters we grew to know and love the first time around.

I did have a couple of gripes, though. As with the first game, there really aren't enough decision points to make playing through the game multiple times to get more of the nine possible endings feel worthwhile, as 90% of each play through will be exactly the same every time. That said, I am planning on starting a new game as soon as I finish this review, because I do want to see at least one other ending and there are seven chances to go a different route.

And, while most of the puzzles were clever enough to feel satisfying when we figured them out, but not so difficult as to be annoying - that did change over time, with a couple of the bigger puzzles seeming very counter-intuitive, and the clues in the book becoming less and less clear. I also found the mini-game you have to play every time you get too many things wrong in a row a bit tedious.

But, overall, a compelling, exciting, fun, satisfying, beautiful game - I hope the series continues!

[Edit to say: It took me three hours to speed-run straight through the game a second time to get a different ending - first time through Steam says it took Dave and me 14 hours total. Our Strange Horticulture play-throughs took about 9 hours each.]

Kiki's Delivery Service, by Eiko Kadono is a 1980s Japanese children's book, which the famous Studio Ghibli film is based on. It's about a young witch heading out into the world to make her living, and setting up a delivery service in a coastal town.
It took me a while to get into it because it felt very stilted and a bit flat to start with - plus, I didn't actually like Kiki all that much at the start!
Also:
Protagonist - Kiki
Her mother - Kokiri
The town - Koriko
Confusing...
It did get better as it went along, and I liked following Kiki's journey of making a place for herself in the town. But it's very slight (I know it's a kids' book, but still) and felt a bit rushed.
Still, enjoyable overall.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna is a cute, cosy story about a witch called Mika, who is invited to tutor three young witch girls at a giant house in the country. It's about found family, building community and breaking through barriers caused by relationship trauma from the past. It's very sweet and heartfelt and also pretty funny in places and I enjoyed listening to the audiobook a lot. It acknowledges the issues with fully trusting people when you've had bad experiences in the past - though I did feel as though the resolution of all the various aspects of the plot seemed too easy and too neat. Very lovely overall, though!


Orange by Ichigo Takano is a manga about a group of high school friends, one of whom receives a letter from her future self, warning that the new boy in her class will die before the year is out and asking that she try to save him. A lot of it deals with quite dark subjects and complex emotions - and it does that very well. It also has its silly moments, and the romance aspects are incredibly painful. But its heart is very much in the right place and it definitely hit me in the feels pretty strongly at various moments. It felt a bit drawn out - and the extra two volumes after the end of the main story, while they did add a certain amount, did feel a bit scattershot and confusing at times. There were several twists I didn't see coming, and I grew to really love all the characters over the course of the story.

Back when I read this for the first time, in 2012, I said World War Z by Max Brooks was the best book I'd read all year (and it was December) - and I went into it this time, still thinking it was one of the best books I'd ever read. And it is really well written, very clever, really interesting and very impactful - but it's also incredibly gore, extremely unpleasant, wildly depressing and all-round grim. And I'm just not in the mood for that at the moment, so I didn't finish it this time around.