I wishlisted Strange Antiquities after spotting it in the recent Thinky Direct showcase, and I rushed to play the demo as soon as it dropped. It’s from Bad Viking, the same devs behind Strange Horticulture, so if you enjoyed that one, this is absolutely your kind of strange. The demo gave me a satisfying 90 minutes of playtime… though 30 of that was spent stuck on a single item!
You play as a Thaumaturge’s apprentice (a term I didn’t expect to see outside of FFXIV) taking over the Strange Antiquities shop from your boss, Thaumaturge Eli White. However, he doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of faith in me — rude. He also warns me not to open any locked cabinets… So obviously, now I want to open all the cabinets.
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Eli hands over a book called Strange Artefacts for customer reference. Am I supposed to read all this? I skim a few pages and immediately get distracted petting Jupiter, the shop cat, who purrs in approval. Once you’re ready for customers, you ring a bell, they shuffle in and tell you a bit about themselves, and then it’s up to you to identify which artefact they’re after.
You can inspect each item across four categories:
- Colour and composition
- A sense of touch
- Scent and sound
- Inner perception
Hover your cursor over the object and your thoughts will appear, from there, it’s deduction time. Matching the request to the artefact was actually trickier than it looked (though I didn’t miss a single one, thank you very much), and you’ll need to scour the shop thoroughly. Correct matches earn you new pages for your artefact book — which will no doubt be handy later.
Some artefacts are sneakily hidden in plain sight. I spent twenty minutes looking for an Ossic Ring that I’d literally looked at dozens of times already. Stay sharp.
You can label items for easy recall, and the system is delightfully customisable, with different colours, shapes, and symbols. I spent a fair chunk of time making mine look neat and decoding customer slang for certain items. There is an auto-labelling option in the settings, which I only discovered after manually organising everything, of course.
One of the customers was actually the lady from Strange Horticulture! She returns a book that explains the label symbols, and suddenly it all clicks into place.
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After wrapping up the first day, I had to trace a glowing shape with my mouse, like spellcasting in Hogwarts Legacy… Or most Harry Potter games for that matter. The traced shape becomes a card with a clue/instructions on it. Follow them, and you can find new curios for your shop.
Honestly, a tutorial would’ve gone a long way to explaining how the shop, items, and map all work. I went wandering without purpose and had a very bad time. Moral of the story: don’t roam blindly.
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The demo wraps up on day two and left me hungry for more, you can play it for yourself on Steam. There’s no launch date just yet, but go on and wishlist it for updates, and in the meantime I’ll be brushing up on my Strange Horticulture while I wait for the full release.
