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Along with sleuths like Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, and Hercule Poirot, pop culture is full of detectives who aren't, technically, real detectives. Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote was a novelist who just happened to solve in the neighborhood of 250 murders. Father Brown was an exceptionally nosy small town priest who had a knack for sniffing out the truth. Encyclopedia Brown was a smug little narc who constantly ratted out his classmates. You don't need credentials or a badge to solve crimes.

I also became an unofficial detective by sitting behind the counter of a flower shop in 2022's Strange Horticulture (). It didn't seem like a detective game at first: customers came into my botany shop with a request and it was my job to figure out what unusual plant they were looking for.

But over time it revealed itself as a real detective game: I gathered clues, examined evidence, and pieced together a small mystery with each customer request as a larger, darker mystery unfolded outside the doors of my gloomy but cozy little shop. Strange Horticulture isn't just a puzzle game, it's .

So I was [[link]] pretty excited to play a demo of Bad Viking's sequel, . Taking [[link]] place in the same town, Undermere, as the original game, now you're running a little curio shop. Once again, customers file into your store with a request, and you've got to piece together clues to figure out which artifact might help them out.

And instead of plants, your shop will become filled with unusual occult relics. The demo I played only lasted for two in-game days and I could only assist a handful of customers, but by the end I still had a great collection of items to show off: stone tablets carved with runes, brass effigies adorned with markings, pendants, sculptures, and even a weird blackened claw-like hand wearing a gold ring. That's my kinda [[link]] inventory.

Along with the new merchandise, there are new ways to examine and identify items. In Strange Horticulture you'd peer at plants with a magnifying glass and pore through pages in your botany book to suss out which plant was which. In Strange Antiquities you not only have several books to look through for clues, but you can use more of your senses while forming an ID.

First, you can examine an item's color and get a description of the material it's made from. "Iron-grey metal flecked with dark red. It's not rust, it's blood" said the description of one item in my shop, which appeared to be a statuette of a six-fingered hand with an unblinking eye in its palm. Is an item hot? Cold? Soft or hard? You can use your sense of touch to examine not just the object as a whole but different parts of it.

You can also listen to artifacts (I didn't hear anything in the demo, but I wouldn't be shocked if some of the items started talking, or maybe wailing) and sniff them to see if they emanate a scent, another useful way to help you determine exactly what the object is.

Then there's a sort of nebulous detective tool called "inner perception." What vibe does this weird thing give you? I didn't detect much with this in the demo either, though one item made me feel as if I was being watched—which, weirdly enough, perfectly fit one particular customer's needs.

Why would someone want to buy a piece of jewelry that instilled a feeling of paranoia? I won't spoil it, but it's actually a very good reason.

In Strange Horticulture you could open a map and explore the mysterious world around your little town while hunting for new plants. In Strange Antiquities, I only had a map of the town itself, but it was still fun to explore by visiting a few locations like a farm and a library to uncover new objects and information.

I even popped by the botany shop from the first game and brought a plant back to my new artifact store where it now sits on a shelf next to a wooden carving of an owl and pendant with one green eye that follows my mouse movements. (I haven't identified that second one yet, but I'm dying to.)

The is just a teeny, tiny sample of the full game, but it strikes the same cozy yet creepy notes as the original adventure and opens up the sleuthing with several fun new investigative tools. I'm officially counting the days until I can tidy up my countertop, pet my shop cat, and ring the bell to welcome the next customer. There's no release date yet, but I'll cross the fingers of the weird claw-like hand on my shelf and hope it's soon.