Botany Manor Accessibility Review (Switch)

Last year, at the Access-Ability Summer Showcase 2023, we showcased a trailer for a game called Botany Manor, published by Whitethorn Games.

Before I jump into my review of Botany Manor, I want to be clear up front about that context.

While I went out of my way to showcase Botany Manor as an example of a promising accessibility focused video game releasing in the year ahead, I do not feel any obligation to cover the title in a purely positive light upon its release. There’s a lot that I think it does well, but there are some points of friction I had with the game.

Basically, feel free to treat this review with some scepticism as last year I showcased the title during the Access-Ability Summer Showcase, but I do wish to assure you that my inclusion of the title in last year’s showcase isn’t preventing me from having critical feedback.

Anyway, context given, let’s dive into the review proper.

Botany Manor is a first person puzzle exploration game in which you explore a large home and its surrounding gardens, attempting to cultivate different plants by collecting clues and recreating ideal growing conditions via abstract problem solving.

Each chapter of the game features up to four plant seeds to discover, and a limited portion of the manor house to explore for clues towards those plants needs. These clues can vary from newspaper clippings, to paintings, to books, to objects scattered around the home.

Each plant found in the game has a page dedicated to it in a journal. Players are able to assign clues found in that chapter to a limited number of clue slots per plant, with the game confirming when all clues selected for a plant are correct, providing confirmation that you’ve got all the information required to determine how to correctly cause this plant to bloom.

While the initial puzzles in the game are fairly simple, with assembled clues leading pretty directly to what temperature a plant needs to thrive or how strong it likes the wind to be, as the game progresses clues become more abstract, with more steps required to interpret when getting from a complete collection of clues to the final process of a plant blooming.

While the game lacks any form of in-game hint system, each chapter does feature vague hints as to which rooms the chapters remaining clues can be found within. This will not provide support if you’re struggling to find a clue within a given room, or need to interpret a clue that you’ve previously discovered, but once the game is officially released walkthrough guides online will likely help to paper over some of the absence of in-game hint tools.

While I generally found that the game does a good job of making clues easy enough to locate by limiting the amount of the manor that’s opened up to explore at any one time, there were a couple of times in the game where I did get stuck, and require assistance to find an accidentally overlooked object in the manor, particularly the more it began to open up over time. There are a few minor moments where I thought that I’d softlocked the game, only to realise that the game wanted something from me that I had overlooked.

Talking generally about my experience with the game before digging into accessibility aspects, I really enjoyed my time playing through Botany Manor. The game’s art style is beautiful, the process of filling out clues into a research journal was a really satisfying contextual layer to place on top of the puzzle solving, and the feeling of reward upon completing a puzzle and seeing a plant begin to bloom was really rewarding. The game doesn’t outstay its welcome in length, and the manor itself is a really well realised space that felt truly lived in.

The environmental storytelling in Botany Manor was a real highlight, exploring the life of a woman with a keen understanding of botany but societal barriers preventing her from being taken seriously academically in the late 1800’s. The act of exploring botany as a research topic, an area of discovery and exploration, set against a backdrop of academia disregarding women’s insights and discoveries, made for a bitter sweet backdrop to such a wonderful game about the rewarding nature of self propelled research.

In terms of accessibility, I want to start with the positives about Botany Manor.

The game supports reading any in-game stylised text using an overlay toggle, instead reading text in a sans serif font on a dark black background. This really helped walk the line between allowing visual flavour to text objects, while ensuring that clues could be easily read in context.

None of Botany Manor’s puzzles feature time limits, or require moving quickly between interactions, which was very much appreciated.

All button holds in game can be turned into toggles, most importantly including sprinting, and looking around in first person.

Music and Sound effects can be separately altered, which is appreciated as some puzzles seem to provide player feedback via audio to help confirm closeness to the correct answer. While I did not find any puzzles which could not be completed without audio, there were definitely some puzzles where on screen captioning of sound effects would have been beneficial, such as a puzzle where a plant was making more noise the closer it came to its ideal blooming conditions. This was never a barrier to progression, but it was something that was missed out if you weren’t hearing sound.

Botany Manor also supports single stick gameplay, with the option to play the full game without needing to use either two sticks at the same time, or sticks at the same time as D-Pad inputs. This worked really nicely in practice, and is a feature that I’d love to see more games actively include.

Lastly, let’s get to the specific aspect of this game’s accessibility features I have more mixed feelings on, the game’s motion sickness tools.

As any of you who regularly watch this show will likely know, I suffer from pretty severe chronic motion sickness. There are steps I can take to try and preemptively mitigate symptoms, such as taking Ginger supplements before playing first person games, playing with a window open to feel a fresh cool breeze, and playing when I’m well rested. However, even with these mitigations in place, first person games can be difficult for me to play. As such, I always really appreciate when first person games offer motion sickness mitigation tools.

Botany Manor does offer a lot of motion sickness mitigation settings, and they did a lot to help make the experience playable for me. I want to be clear up front before I get critical, while I have some small issues, generally speaking the settings offered did a lot to help make the game playable for me. I was able to complete Botany Manor over a few days with minimal issues, but there were some areas where I did have to put the game down to recover from motion sickness regardless, and I want to talk about my understanding of the causes of that in this specific game.

Botany Manor features a dedicated motion sickness accessibility menu. Options offered include a Camera Smoothing slider, a Camera Sensitivity Slider, a Field of View slider, the ability to add a dark vignette border around screen edges, a toggle to turn off walking acceleration, the ability to turn off first person camera transitions when inspecting clues or sitting down, adding a crosshair to the middle of the screen, and toggling the size of that crosshair.

On paper, this list of accessibility features for motion sickness is pretty much perfect. The menu even explains for each slider or toggle what kind of change is likely to help a person who is prone to motion sickness, so that players with motion sickness issues who haven’t been offered support tools like this before are able to understand that increasing their field of view for example rather than reducing it is what they should be doing with that particular offered slider.

The game doesn’t feature any head bob when walking or running as default either, usually the biggest culprit for motion sickness getting triggered for me in first person games.

The issues I had with motion sickness mainly came from two factors, the game’s framerate inconsistency on Nintendo Switch, and the lack of ability to check clues from the game’s journal encouraging use of sprint to revisit clues in their initial locations.

I played through Botany Manor on Nintendo Switch. I specifically requested Switch review code for the game, as a gentle paced exploration game of that nature fits best into my life as a second screen experience, and while I own more powerful handhelds like the Steam Deck or Lenovo Legion Go, the lightweight nature of the Switch and closed ecosystem make it my personal preferred place to play portable games.

While Botany Manor aims for 30FPS on Switch, it isn’t always consistent in maintaining that, particularly if you move quickly through the world, or at times when quickly turning the camera. It’s not huge dips, but the framerate inconsistency is enough to be felt. This is in part on me choosing to play the Switch version, but framerate inconsistency is something I find contributes to me experiencing motion sickness in first person games. A lower framerate isn’t necessarily an issue, but consistency of framerate is important to that experience.

However, the bigger issue I found caused me to experience motion sickness flair ups was to do with an absent game feature, and the way that it encouraged me to play the game.

While you’re keeping a research journal as you explore Botany Manor, keeping track of each clue and where you found it, there’s no way to view a given clue without returning to the location where it is found.

Sprinting in Botany Manor, even when using the game’s accessibility features, caused my motion sickness to flair up. Now, generally I didn’t sprint at all when initially exploring new areas, but it was hard to resist using sprint as the game opened up larger and larger areas, with clues becoming more geographically spread out. If I just wanted to double check a set of clues quickly, my choices were to slowly walk back and forth, or much more quickly sprint. I had to choose between respecting my time, or risking motion sickness onset.

Playing on Switch, I ultimately ended up taking screenshots using the console’s capture button, and using these screenshots to reference clues rather than backtracking to check them in game. It saved me time, and avoided the motion sickness risk of sprinting up or down some in game stairs. However, it took me an embarrassingly long time to think of the fact I could do that.

For most of my time with the game, what I found myself wanting to do was to revisit collected clues from within my in game journal. I kept looking for some way to click on a clue in the journal, see what text it had said on it, and not need to backtrack to check it in person.

Given that it’s in the context a research journal, it feels like allowing you to re-examine clues noted down within it would have made sense, perhaps scribbled down on some note taking page at the back, and could have helped avoid the need to sprint back and forth, or slowly trek back and forth across the manor, or take my own external screenshots.

Now, again, to be clear, the motion sickness options offered by Botany Manor are really helpful. I was able to play the game start to finish with minimal breaks due to motion sickness flare ups, and would have otherwise found the game a lot more illness inducing to play.

My main advice would be that if you’re prone to experiencing motion sickness, take your own screenshots of clues to revisit them without having to backtrack too much to clue discovery locations. If take your own screenshots rather than backtracking back and forth, I think the Switch version should be fairly accessible for motion sickness prone players, but playing the game on a slightly more powerful system might help to mitigate motion sickness in addition to revisiting clues via screenshots. It might be a little extra bit of help, but you might not need it if you make liberal use of screenshotting.

Botany Manor is a charming game, blending puzzle solving, exploration of plantlife, and a story of a woman desperate to share the things she’s learned with the world. The accessibility support on offer is strong in many regards, even if the motion sickness tools available leave a little bit of remaining room for improvement.