Strange Antiquities - Switch Review

Strange Antiquities, from UK-based indie devs Bad Viking, is the sequel to 2022’s well-received Strange Horticulture and takes on much the same form – it is a dark, cosy puzzle game which takes place in the gloomy, fictional, northern English town of Undermere. However, rather than inheriting a plant shop, in Strange Antiquities you play as the apprentice shopkeeper at the titular antiques store, a small space dense with shelves that contain all manner of occult artefacts, amulets and totems...

The Good

Unfortunately you are apparently terrible at your job, as you start the game not knowing what any of these peculiar items actually are. And so come the core puzzles of the game: day by day, locals will come into your shop looking for a particular item. Using the reference books you have to hand, you must identify which of the many objects is the correct one to fulfil the request. As you complete these puzzles, you’ll earn more reference materials and more items to stock, allowing you to fulfil future requests, and so on. These antiquity-identification puzzles make up most of the game, and fortunately they are generally great. The process of using the various reference books on glyphs, gemstones and history, examining the items for weight, smell and magic aura, and then applying a little bit of lateral thinking and brainpower will leave you feeling like an ace detective when you get it right. This is particularly true in the later, often-much-trickier puzzles where you’re tasked to work out what item the customer actually needs before trying to identify it, rather than just being given the name of an item to find. 

Overlaid on this are several other layers of puzzles as you investigate both the store itself – where hidden compartments and keys abound – and the wider town, solving riddles and deciphering cryptic notes to find the location of more artefacts to fill up your shelves. Curiosity and exploring the store are certainly both rewarded and rewarding. Also rewarding is organising your store – especially when you’re searching for a particular item later in the game. It’s in no way required, but moving the items around and embracing the cosy atmosphere of managing the store itself becomes its own little meditative experience. 

The game takes place over 18 days, where the town of Undermere is plagued by dark omens, mysterious illnesses and deaths. The characters, writing and aesthetic all evoke the gloomy, ominous tone of the game and keep you engaged with the overarching story. Your agency over the plot is from key decisions you make when serving certain characters – can they be trusted with the powerful amulet they want or would it be better to give them a calming stone instead? These choices you make will affect the individual characters’ and the town’s fates in the endgame, which can provide a reason for an extra playthrough or two.

TL;DR

• Engaging and tricky puzzles
• Multiple endings and reasons to replay
• Sound design and writing contribute well to overall foreboding atmosphere

The Bad

Unfortunately for Strange Antiquities, the fun plot, writing and characters lay bare the main gripe I had with the game: it never actually lets you leave the store. For example, while you technically explore the town for new antiques, you actually just click on a building on the map and receive a couple of paragraphs of text describing what happened to you there. Similarly, your primary interaction with the overall plot is characters coming into the store and telling you what happened to them, or maybe handing you a note from someone that relays some interesting events that took place elsewhere while you were in the shop. This is obviously a conscious choice of the game, and it does make sense leaning into its small, cosy, puzzle-y nature – I’m not suggesting you wander the streets having turn-based battles or anything – but the overall impact is to leave you feeling more and more detached from the actual story, the town and the impact you are having on it. An extra image or an environment or two would have been welcome and added an awful lot.

This is at its most egregious towards the end of the game, where progress on the story (which has become world-endingly urgent at this point) is put on hold while you continue to serve a series of generic customers who simply want to pick up a new arcane ward for their sister or similarly inconsequential items that exacerbate the distance between what you’re doing and what the game wants you to care about. I found this started to bleed through to my enjoyment of the actual puzzles too, which ultimately can start to feel a little repetitive in the steps you must take to find the right object each time. I was speeding through non-story-related conversation and puzzles in the latter stages as I looked to finish the game, feeling a bit more inconvenienced than I should.

On a practical level, Strange Antiquities was clearly designed with a mouse in mind, and while it plays absolutely fine overall using control sticks, there are moments of awkwardness here and there – accidentally putting objects down, moving a screen across, and so on. This is nothing major but worth noting if you also have the option of playing on PC (Switch 2 mouse mode isn’t an option).

TL;DR

• You will feel a little detached from the story
• Identifying artefacts starts to drag eventually
• Designed for mouse controls

Final Score: 7/10

Strange Antiquities will delight fans of puzzles and dark, cosy games alike. The puzzles are challenging and varied, and you will certainly enjoy your time as shopkeeper. Some eventual repetition and lack of agency on your part does, however, mean it is probably best enjoyed in bite-sized sessions.

Thank you for checking out our Strange Antiquities Switch review, thank you to Iceberg Interactive (via Plan of Attack) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
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