The thing about dating someone who’s into vintage trinkets is that you end up in a lot of antique shops. It’s an adventure I’ve come to love over the past few years. There’s nothing like walking into a musky store that feels displaced in time and looking at shelves lined with alien objects. What is this thing? Who made this? Why? Every curiosity is its own mystery.
Strange Antiquities, a follow-up to 2022’s excellent Strange Horticulture, bottles that experience up into a delightful deduction game and adds in a drop of occult magic. It’s a puzzle game for anyone who wants the joy of browsing without the dust-induced sneezing fit that comes with it.
Rather than running a flower shop like developer Bad Viking’s previous game, Strange Antiquities puts you in charge of a store that sells mysterious artifacts. Each one is some form of foreboding totem or mysterious necklace adorned with gems and runes. It’s your job to give customers the item they need despite having no idea what anything is. To do that, you’ll look through your handy catalog of inventory in search of contextual clues that hint at what it looks like. An entry might tell you what shape to look for, how heavy it is, or what material it’s generally made out of.
Bad Viking gets so much mileage out of what’s essentially a second go at the same idea. What begins as a simple-enough task soon becomes the basis for ever-evolving puzzles that require me to look at an object from every angle. At one point, I get a book detailing different gemstones, allowing me to deduce the hidden meaning in something I assumed was just purely decorative. I use scales to test weight, inspect objects to hear the sound they make, and even work out how an object might need to combine runic symbols to create its desired magic effect.
There are several layers of mystery underneath that satisfying identification hook. Customers slowly tell me of the chaos brewing outside the store (it involves a lot of birds), there are secret nooks in my shop that I discover through notes passed to me from a mailman, and I can find new trinkets by following clues to correctly locate specific areas on a series of maps. There are puzzles within puzzles within puzzles, creating an eerie rabbit hole that builds out a world I never actually see from the counter of my safe shop.
It gets complicated, but a very generous hint system makes it easy to find a lead and let you focus on enjoying the creepy-cozy vibe of it all. Don’t be ashamed of using it either: failing too many times will drop you into a somewhat tedious Yahtzee-like minigame where you need to make the proper dice matches to avoid losing your sanity.
While those inevitable failures wore me out a little in later chapters, Strange Antiquities nails the feeling of being a certified trinket enjoyer. Even now in my own home, I often think about the haunted statue of a regal woman that stares at my bed from a bureau across from it. It’s one of my girlfriend’s prized possessions, which she has named Amelia. She doesn’t know anything about the statue’s origins; she just won it on a whim in an online auction. I’ll likely never know who it’s a statue of, when it was made, or where it used to live. I know there’s a story there that I’ll never solve, and that allure keeps me staring at it every night before I fall asleep.
