Epic Games is giving away a woefully underrated puzzle game, so get it while you can

If Blue Prince taught us anything last year, it’s that some of the best games you’ve never played might be sweet, illustrative-style puzzlers from indie developers. If you’ve played Blue Prince and are waiting for something new to take its place, Botany Manor, one of the free Epic games for this week, is a must-try.

The first thing that strikes you about Botany Manor is its incredible aesthetic. Taking place inside an English Victorian manor house, your surroundings are inspired by classic, vintage style. Think dark wood, richly colored paint, and sunlight leaking through stained-glass windows. In fact, even the achievement icons are styled after stained glass, giving any completionist one more reason to get them all.

The art style of Botany Manor is pleasingly individual, offering a bright, overly saturated, painterly look within its first-person 3D environment. Imagine a combination of Blue Prince and The Witness.

However, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and this one comes through with content worthy of its immaculate appearance. We’re speaking literally and metaphorically here, as a book is central to Botany Manor’s gameplay. Forgotten Flora is the life’s work of one Arabella Green, the protagonist, who is staying at Botany Manor as she researches exotic flora in a bid to complete her tome.

None of this feels like work, though, and there’s no pressure here. Despite its puzzle game nature, Botany Manor is an incredibly peaceful and charming experience. Discovering and growing mysterious, rare plants requires you to find and use strange apparatus and pore through intriguing texts, and there’s a real pleasure in seeing your research come to fruition. All of this is topped off by a joyful instrumental soundtrack, creating one of the best puzzle game releases of the last few years.

Botany Manor is free to keep on Epic Games Store until Thursday, February 12. You can download it here.

And that’s not all, as fans of the altogether different Pixel Gun 3D will be pleased to hear that the Poison Retro Set DLC, usually worth $24.99/£20.99, is also free this week. You will need the base game to be able to use the add-on, but the good news is that that’s free all the time!