If you think more games should be about giving cursed skulls to weird strangers, then I'm here to tell you that you're fine, you're normal, you're right, and you should play Strange Antiquities.
You may have already played Bad Viking's first game in the 'Strange' series, Strange Horticulture, a gothically-tinged tale of running a plant shop, but with more than a touch of Lovecraftian business lurking in the shadows. As someone who's a little bored of the more toothless cosy games on the market, I'm always delighted to find something with sinister undercurrents and supernatural goings-on. Also, ritual murder! Not enough cosy games feature ritual murder.
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Strange Antiquities might be more of the same after Horticulture, but it's a great formula. People come in, they tell you their woes, and you use your logical and deductive skills to locate the object on your shelves that will solve their problems.
The clever thing is that your shelves are filled with a ton of objects that could, potentially, fit the vague description in the book, and it takes careful reading and attention to clues to pick the right one. If you're looking for something made of gold, should you pick the necklace, or the totem? If you need something that represents a lunar goddess, should you pick an item made in her image, or in the shape of the moon? For detective game sickos like me (and you, I bet) who love having to decipher cryptic clues like you're trying to ask Rumpelstiltskin for directions, this is basically catnip.
Strange Antiques also has that rare quality of making the player feel masterful, which is hard to achieve, because the player usually has absolutely zero experience doing whatever it is the game's about. I love Ace Attorney, but I know diddly squat about the law, and although I technically have grown vegetables in my real-life garden, my harvest has never been as bountiful or marketable as those I grow in Stardew Valley.
Likewise, I've never been a semi-magical purveyor of arcane goods who occasionally explores graveyards and ruins to find more (although if you see a job posting for that, please send it to me), but Strange Antiquities – with all its reference tomes and maps – makes me feel incredibly competent at the task. A customer comes in, says something unhelpfully ambiguous about their ailment, and waits patiently as I comb through my books, cross-reference them with items, and finally settle on an object to give them.
When you're not giving out curios and knicknacks, you're exploring, through Strange Antiquities' concise and clever daily riddles. Some of these riddles are presented as text – "An escaped prisoner ran north-west. He hid me in the first building he came to" – which require you to find a location on a map that corresponds to its clues. In that example, you have to find a prison, trace a line northwest, and find the first building on that line. That one's easy, because it's the first one, but it still has that fulfilling sense of reading between the lines that all good detective games cultivate.
Other riddles are more opaque, providing you with nothing but a shape, and hoping that you'll have studied your maps enough to recognise that it's the outline of a house, or a tombstone, or a room. These puzzles need you to notice subtle details, read between the lines, and cultivate an internal spatial understanding of each area, in order to solve the riddle. Asking players to engage with the world on such an intimate level is genius – it creates a sense of player-directed immersion that adds to that feeling of mastery and ownership.
All of this is to say that, in a year dominated by detective-y puzzle-y games, most of which are not on the Switch (boo), I feel like Strange Antiquities has flown a little under the radar. The much-lauded clique of Blue Prince, The Roottrees are Dead, The Drifter, The Seance of Blake Manor, Type Help, and the various Golden Idol add-ons deserve their praise, but Strange Antiquities deserves to be up there on the puzzle podium with them. It's tough when the competition is so stiff!
So, if you're reading this and you enjoy clues and riddles and all that business, give Strange Antiquities a go (plus Strange Horticulture, if you haven't already played it). And then add it to your Game of The Year list, because it's certainly earned a place on mine. And it's not just because a strange shopkeeper gave me a Purified Amulet Of GOTY. I don't think, anyway.
Have you taken up the desk in Strange Antiquities and spent hours solving riddles and mysteries? Get thinking and tell us what you think of the game in the comments.