I love a publisher that stays on brand. There’s plenty of successful publishers with great track records out there, but if you asked me to name my five favorite games from 505, Focus, or Daedalic Entertainment, I wouldn’t have a clue. That’s why I’m smitten by Whitethorn Games, an up-and-coming indie publisher that specializes in all things comfy and cozy. When you browse Whitethorn’s catalog you know exactly what you’re going to get, and if you like any of its games, there’s a good chance you’ll like all of them. I went hands-on with a selection of Whitethorn’s new and upcoming slate at PAX East thi🍌s weekend, and they ended up being some of my favorites from the entire show.
Botany Manor
Retired 19th-century botanist Arabella Greene revists the milestones in her life by blooming a series of plants scattered around her elaborate, maze-like estate. This is a puzzle/exploration game that looks and plays a lot like The Witness and features some inventive plant-based puzzles. I loved the way it combin♕es storytelling with puzzles as you simultaneously search the manor for clues about Arabella’s life and the means of solving each puzzle. You’ll need to engage in some deductive reasoning to sort out the exact process for blooming each plant as you fill your journal up with clues, but there’s a steady progression that eases you into the methods of logic you’ll need to use throughout.
There’s a clever escalation to the suspension of disbelief required to solve each puzzle too. You begin in a completely realistic environment: an outdoor greenery full of garden eౠquipment and information on plant-life. Once you find the seed and pot it, your goal is to determine the correct temperature to make it bloom based on the region it origജinated from. It’s a simple process of cross-referencing the available information, and it can be solved in a matter of moments.
For the next plant, you need to use a more unnatural method to make it bloom. It requires a bright flash of light, so after positioning it﷽ in front of an old-timey camera, you have to do a bit of chemistry to make the exact recipe for flash powder, fill the camera, then snap a photo to make it bloom. As the game progresses, it seems likely there will be more and more fantastical solutions to make each flower bloom. Botany Manor is coming to Steam later this year.
Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island
Mythwrecked is a mystery/adventure game that follows a girl named Aജlex who finds herself shipwrecked on a mythical island - hence, Mythwrecked. She doesn’t know how or why she ended up here, but quickly learns the island is filled with mysteries to solve. Its residents are all from the pantheon of Greek Gods, but for some reason they don’t remember who they are, and they all seem to be terrified of each other.
The studio behind Mythwrecked, Polygon Treehouse, refers to it a🌜s a ‘friend-em-up’ because of its non-combative gameplay. As Alex meets each resident she is tasked with finding their lost belongings to help reignite their memories and uncover the secrets of the island, and in the process of increasing her friendship rating with them to unlock new dialog and quest options.
It’s extremely dialogue heavy, but I enjoyed exploring Polygon Treehouses’ take on the Greek gods and slowly scratching away at its central mysteries. The first person you meet is Hermes, who looks like a high school gym teacher in his tighty-whities - hopefully that image doesn’t trigger anything traumatic for you. At first he’s unwilling to tell you what he knows about the island and its other residents, but as you help him find his lost items and increase your friendship, he’ll eventually start peelin🦩g back the layers of the mystery.
Mythwrecked has a nonlinea🌌r structure that allows you to befriend the 💛gods and investigate the island in whatever order you’d like. As a big fan of The Forgotten City, this is hitting all the right notes. Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island is launching on Steam later this year.
The Forest Cathedral
The Forest Cathedral is the heaviest of the bunch, as it deals with the real-life consequences that pesticides have had on our environment. It’s an imaginative retelling of Silen💖t Spring, a 1962 book written by environmentalist Rachel Carson about her investigation into the effects of pesticides and the lies told by the compan🍬ies that manufactured them.
As you explore the fo🍌rest from a first-person perspective, you use Rachel’s scanner to solve puzzles and platforming challenges that blend the 3D and 2D world together in a fascinating way. It has elements of games like Dear Esther, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The Pedestrian, and The Witness. It’s got more 2D platforming than I expected, but it does a great job of telling a resonant story in a short amount of time. If you would like to get mad about the environment while enjoying a beautifully rendered forest - and who doesn’t - give this one a try. It’s available now on Steam, EGS, and Xbox Series X/S.