Strange Antiquities Review – Sequel Vibrates With Good Vibes

Strange Antiquities Review

Strange Antiquities knows I can’t resist a spooky story.

Any devout fan of haunted tales and rainy London streets should check out developer Bad Viking’s Strange Antiquities. This puzzle adventure game is the successor to 2022’s Strange Horticulture — but Instead of hawking plants, you’re sharing occult objects with the people of not-quite-Victorian England.

After all, what’s a scarier point of sale than a storefront full of demonic antiques?

Come one, come all

Strange Antiquities’ gameplay loop is straightforward. You play a shopkeeper’s assistant unexpectedly left in charge of the shop’s dangerous wares. Customers ask for helping finding a specific item or solving a specific problem. It’s up to you to fill those requests.

Players cross-reference an occult guide, using references to match the item you’re looking for with objects on the shelf.As you progress, players acquire more identifiers to cross-reference and books to cross-reference them in. No longer is noticing an item’s sketch or matching the materials an item gives off likely to be enough; you’ll increasingly need to use your gemstone guide or symbology book to disentangle complex arrays of magic symbols.

Give the customer the wrong relic, and your fear meter ratchets up a few more notches. When it tops out, players must match a series of dice rolls with corresponding symbols. If you lose…well, you try again. The lack of consequence means players risk tedium, not terror. From mysterious letters and tarot cards to catacombs and castles, there’s seemingly no end to the items and places that can be unearthed.

Trinket-pilled

Oh, how I love to arrange my shelves full of relics. If I wasn’t feeling up to the puzzles, finding new ways to organize my occult friends was an endlessly satisfying task.

To be clear, not all of these objects were my friends. To learn more about each object, players check them out using sight, sound, smell, and touch. We can all guess the bloodstained hand isn’t a great artifact to keep around, but you’d be surprised at some of the chilling objects hiding in plain sight.

Strange Antiquities’ main gameplay loop of meeting customers’ demands is satisfying, if occasionally frustrated by so much cross-checking. The best feeling is when the books don’t come out at all — you’ve learned what you need to know.

Puzzled out

Once you’re really rolling with the game, it’s difficult to keep track of all the story elements in Strange Antiquities. Three maps, a half dozen letter fragments, and a recurring cast of characters all with their own problems make for a scattered experience. This isn’t helped by a personal lack of interest in the thaumic symbols that make up so much of the late game. I’ve never clicked with puzzle games that rely on symbology in this way.

Well-constructed logic puzzles don’t need crutches like thaumic lenses and obtuse symbology to get players across the finish line. It doesn’t ruin the experience — even otherwise stellar games like The Case of the Golden Idol make similar mistakes — but it does make identifying some relics an unsatisfying kind of difficult.

Occult machinery

My greatest hope for this game would be just a little more fun to play on Steam Deck than Strange Horticulture. Like the last game, Strange Antiquities is largely optimized for Steam Deck. There are improvements from the previous; sliding around the screen is more natural, for example. Unfortunately, the game’s basic mechanics are still so tied to point-and-click that even moving around the screen feels like a concession.

It’s hard enough for indie developers to fight a saturated market. I’m sure it’s even harder to factor in handheld controls for a game they intended for PC. But when I want to play a cozy mystery game like Strange Antiquities, I’ll always go for the handheld option.

Mapping the story

One of my favorite elements were the text-based secondary locations found in the city, castle, and catacombs. These scenes usually delivered the most best writing and most interesting storytelling. These moments are in service to an engaging larger plot that sucked me during the short game’s final hours. I love the way the branching paths pan out in the finale. While replaying the game doesn’t hold much allure for me, the tantalizing details given to players after the final moments hint at several more interesting endings.

I was disappointed that Strange Antiquities didn’t fix some of my issues with the first game, but it’s still a marked improvement in gameplay complexity and depth. A perfect pick during the Halloween season, Strange Antiquities delivers on that cozy-yet-spooky Victorian vibe with the best of them. If you love mystery games, the pull will be irresistible.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***