Game of the Week: The quiet, restorative puzzles of Botany Manor

One of my favourite paintings is Cucumber House, a watercolour - I think - by Eric Ravilious. It's an airy study in quiet. To me, it always feels like a day off school. We're inside some kind of greenhouse and various plants are growing. Glass slants overhead and there's a sense of careful order, of something lovingly tended, to the layout, the tables, the leaves and shoots. Cucumber House was painted in 1935, and I don't see the thirties as an enormously quiet decade. Ravilious himself would be killed in the war that was already starting to rumble. And yet: breathe in, breathe out. I really do love this painting.

And I love Botany Manor, which is our game of the week. Botany Manor is not actually out yet, but I glimpsed it briefly during this week's Wholesome Direct and there's a demo now on Steam that you can go and play. Botany Manor doesn't just give me Cucumber House vibes because it's all about plants, and because it has the style and poise to kick things off in a greenhouse. It's because it uses plants and greenhouses and the quiet business of making things grow as a means of slowing down the player, settling them into a kinder rhythm. It's like one of those TikToks where you're told to just breathe in and out until the rain has painted the sidewalk.

Botany Manor is a puzzle game. You are tasked with finding out the various requirements that certain seeds have in order to grow. But it's also an exploration game, because you find those requirements by hunting around the manor, reading postcards and newspapers, looking at photographic equipment and generally trying to puzzle things out. The atmosphere is one that videogames are just wonderfully good at: recent absence. The house is quiet but filled with sunlight. I'd put it at around 11 on a Thursday. Blue skies, a light breeze. Pretty much ideal.