Botany Manor is this week’s Epic Games Store free game

Listen up my fellow puzzle and garden sickos, Epic Games Store is giving us everything we ever wanted with their free game of the week this week.

• Botany Manor
  • Release Date: April 9, 2024
  • Game Type: Puzzle, Exploration, Garden Sim
  • POV: 1st person
  • Party: Single player
  • DLC: None, but Steam has the OST available for sale

In Botany Manor, you play as Arabella Greene, a woman in a Victorian manor trying to research the last bits of her book on botany. Plants are complex, and different plants may do different things based on factors like various nutrients and minerals in the soil, pH, light, temperature, and amount of water. While the plants are fictitious, this is similar to real life — don’t ask how many venus fly traps I killed before I found out they cannot have tap water because the extra minerals kill them. You get to explore the manor for clues and materials, in addition to lots of lore about Arabella’s illustrious career as a botanist.

As we round the corner to spring, this is the perfect game to spend the last few days of winter. I’m waiting on a handful of seed and supply orders to get to my house so I can start my seedlings for this summer, so it feels especially timely. Right now is exactly when I get antsy to go outside and start digging, and this game will hold me until my bare root strawberries start to come in.