Strange Antiquities review | PixelArena.io

During my first two hours serving Strange Antiquities’ customers, I tugged the bronze pendulum of an ornate clock at least a dozen times, wondering what the resulting spin and settle of its hands meant. I checked my occult encyclopaedia’s index for mentions of time and compared the clock face to shapes in a book of hermetic symbols. Each time I drew a blank I yanked the pendulum a few more times, just in case.

This follow-up to the joyous 2022 puzzler Strange Horticulture is packed with these promises of future puzzles: a locked cabinet with no key, a sliding-door cupboard with no clear purpose, three empty plinths beneath your shop counter, an engraved desk with four missing chunks. I knew they were all clues, I just couldn’t tell what for.

Until, in a series of glorious moments, I could.

When I realised how the clock fit into a multi-part puzzle that revealed a new area of my shop, I genuinely chuckled with delight, and that feeling repeated several times during my 10-hour playthrough. This is a longer and more uneven puzzle game than Strange Horticulture, but also more ambitious, and just as beguiling.

The general concept remains the same. Customers come to your shop for a specific named item. Your encyclopaedia holds clues for each one, from the concrete – like the shape or material – to the more abstract, such as the feeling it evokes when you hold it, or the fact it’s used to draw blood in an initiation ritual. You touch, listen to, and smell the objects on your shelves, and if you pick the right one you can strike it from your long list. Outside, a story of curses and cults unfolds, and some of the decisions you make, such as which of two items to give a particular customer, can change the outcome.

The objects are imaginative: carved totems with unfamiliar symbols, bejewelled boxes that catch spirits, medallions designed in the image of a snake god, a blood-stained stone held by an eagle’s talons. They all look wonderful on your shelves, however you choose to arrange them. Descriptions are evocative, sometimes with double meanings that made me want to decipher them even more. Does this necklace give me goosebumps because it’s cold or because it’s creepy? Which of these wooden objects could conceivably be described as a “finger”?

At the start, simply knowing that an object is made of bronze with a single gemstone is enough to identify it, but soon the puzzles become tricky, layered challenges. Alongside your encyclopaedia you get a book on gems, a book of symbols, and a book of curses, and you’ll often need to flip between them multiple times to identify a single object. A simple example: if somebody comes in for a curse cure, you’ll first read your curse book to identify their malady, find that curse in your encyclopaedia’s index, and then read all the related entries to identify the object you need.

I was regularly stumped, but every time I split the puzzle into small chunks I could whittle down the possible answers. The hint system points you vaguely in the right direction without outright telling you the answer, which I like, but you can ask for multiple hints at once. When you solve a puzzle you’re handily told which clues were relevant – sometimes these were details I hadn’t even noticed, and that gave me new ideas for solving future puzzles.

I love the feeling of mastery it builds. When you get a new encyclopaedia entry it flashes on screen. You can ignore it, but the key information often stuck in my mind. I lost count of the times I later thought “Wait, I know that name”, and it’s satisfying to use knowledge you didn’t even realise you had. The way encyclopaedia entries flow from one another encourages you to follow your trail of thought, and before you know it you’ve identified three or four objects, rather than just the one. By the end of the game I’d become a proper expert shopkeeper: I knew, without thinking, which gemstone meant death and which meant fire, which symbol meant summer, and which winter. Sometimes I could pick the right object without consulting my books, which felt fantastic.

Its best moments – like with the clock’s pendulum – are not when you’re identifying objects, but when you’re poking around your shop, discovering puzzles hidden in plain sight. To open the locked cabinet in one corner I had to manipulate an object in a way that I hadn’t initially thought was possible, and that empty cupboard I mentioned earlier proved instrumental in a way I won’t spoil, but was equally delightful. The game’s scope constantly surprised me, and it delivers on every one of the promises it teases.

Even the game’s collectible maps conceal secrets of their own. Click on a location and you get a story vignette, often ending with the discovery of a new object. The clues to find these locations – riddles, matching shapes, pattern recognition – are simpler but no less engrossing, and later, you get a device you have to place over one of your maps to find the right spots. I felt like a genius when I figured it out.

In a game with so many puzzles, and so many different types of puzzle, a few duds are inevitable. I gave up identifying a particular medallion only for the hint system to tell me I had to first solve another puzzle I’d picked up (and put down) much earlier in the game, in what seemed like an arbitrary process. On another, I narrowed it down to two possible objects and simply had to guess – even when I saw the correct solution, the other object appeared to fit as well. Still, Strange Antiquities’ density and consistent generosity make it easy to forgive these small missteps.

It helped that I enjoyed simply inhabiting the shop, listening to the rain and thunder outside. I petted my cat every morning until he purred, and stuffed my papers in their drawers every night. After the first customer of every day I reshuffled my shelves to match my mood. Early on I arranged medallions by material – bronze, gold, wood, tin – with a separate section for items that looked particularly arcane. Later, I moved all my identified objects to a separate shelf and sorted medallions by the colour of their gemstone. This isn’t busywork – it’s flexibility that makes the shop feel like a deeply personal space.

I wish it was slightly easier to navigate with my mouse, though. When several objects seemed to fit the clues, I liked to stack them on the desk below my counter, a book open next to them, so I could better compare their markings and gems. To move an object from your shelves to this desk you have to grab each one, hold it at the bottom of the screen until the desk appears, and then drop it – an annoyingly fiddly procedure when it involves shifting four or five items in a row. It is, admittedly, easier if you use the keyboard too, but if ever there was a game designed for a mouse in one hand, coffee in the other, this is it. I also found it too easy to zoom in on a book (double click) when I simply meant to open it (single click).

My enthusiasm for the puzzles also waned in the final hours, partly because its best challenges are all in the middle, and partly because I didn’t care about what was happening outside the shop. The town’s tale of curses, death, betrayal, and rival factions is, like all the words in Strange Antiquities, finely written, direct, and concise. Mildly poetic, even. But because you spend so much time buried in your books and staring at artefacts, it’s easy to forget what the last plot development was. And even if you keep track, the story loses its momentum about two-thirds of the way through, delaying and delaying what feels like an inevitable conclusion.

Even so, the satisfaction of a fully-ticked list kept me going to the end, and I happily lingered for a few more hours to identify objects I’d missed. The highs of Strange Antiquities – and there are many – match those of anything else I’ve played this year, and surely put it up there with Blue Prince among the best puzzle games of 2025. It is fiendish and delightful, and hopefully, one of many more Strange games to come.