Charming deductive puzzle games are always a pleasant time, so it’s time to grab four different books and cross reference symbols, sensations, and smells to give Susan an item that will prevent her dinner party from summoning vultures again. Strange Antiquities is a delightful little puzzler that will use subtle misdirection with its occult theming to throw you for a loop, but at least you always have a cat to pet if you continually misunderstand arcane symbology.
Strange Antiquities takes place in a rainy town called Undermire, and you’re tasked with running a shop that provides occult artifacts to the locals. You’ll be given hints about where to find new items, solve puzzles, and use deductions to help the townsfolk with their often unusual problems.
As you acquire more and more artifacts, you begin to notice strange occurrences within the town, violent people with black sclera in their eyes, murders of crows, and other unsettling occurrences. Is there something more sinister afoot? And even if there is, how could you, a lowly store attendant, do anything about it?
And if the gameplay of Strange Antiquities sounds familiar, that is because it’s made the by the same developer (Bad Viking) and publisher (Iceberg Interactive) that produced the excellent Strange Horticulture game we reviewed a couple years ago. And like that title, this one is also available for the PC on the Steam platform and also for the Nintendo Switch consoles.
Review Notes
The gameplay in Strange Antiquities is one of its more unique aspects. You can pick up any of the objects that are brought into your store, and inspect the color, composition, texture, scent, sound, and any thoughts your character may have about the curio you’re holding. There are a great number of occult artifacts in the shop, and it’s your responsibility to identify the purposes of those items using a handy book that explains some details about the baubles and your own deductive reasoning.
The starting items in the shop include some pendants, animal trophies, a shrunken hand, and your standard occult fare. As you produce various artifacts around the shop, you’ll continuously unlock new curios that you’ll need to identify over the course of Strange Antiquities. At the end of each day, you’ll be given a clue card that will interact with the world map in some way, typically requiring you figure out which space you need to visit that matches whatever hint is on the card. Sometimes it’s as simple as matching the shape to the one on the map, while other times you’ll be required to figure it out based on directions or other clues provided.
Strange Antiquities has a really interesting and inventive way to keep you continually searching through the shop and interacting with the world because who knows when you may need one of these thaumic objects to complete a request! You’ll be given letters from people asking you to come pick up pendants or totems that they’ve found because they believe the objects to be causing their illness, so you’ll also have to figure out where they’re requesting you go, and may even be prompted to use one of your existing curios once you figure out the correct site.
While you begin with your trusty artifacts reference book, you’ll also need to cross reference symbols, the thaumic properties of gemstones, curses, etc., in order to more accurately identify artifacts as you progress through the game. As you collect more and more curious occult objects, it’s important to make sure that you’re properly tagging them as there are quite the number, and it’d be a shame to forget which exact item in the shop is the Voice of Cernunnos.
You can also enter a fail-state condition by offering an incorrect item too many times. Your anxiety begins to build up and if you don’t manage to recover by playing a strange dice game, you’ll eventually lose your mind. And, of course, if you happen to be driven insane by the artifacts and other pressures, then you will also lose the game.
If you manage to keep your sanity throughout the whole experience, however, you’ll be treated to multiple endings each with their own puzzles to solve. The delightful, cartoony visuals, snappy UI, and the ability to reorganize everything in your shop how you like makes engaging with the puzzles a consistently pleasurable experience.
TLDR
With its good mystery, subdued, rainy atmosphere, and loads of puzzle solving and deductions to make, there is a lot to enjoy in Strange Antiquities. You even gain a sense of what goes on outside the shop with various text blurbs and illustrations that accompany searching the town, castle, and catacombs that surround the store. Strange Antiquities certainly isn’t groundbreaking in the puzzle genre by any means, but if you enjoy puzzlers where you need to deduce which items you need to use at what time, Strange Antiquities will perfectly match your tastes.
Developers: Bad Viking
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Steam