I don’t know if there are any health and safety rules for dealing with cursed objects, but the protagonist of Strange Antiquities must blow past them all. Their master is barely out the front door before they’re picking up weird antiques with their bare hands and holding them against their ear. They’ll read about how a particular item causes severe paranoia or twists their intestines into a pretzel and they’ll still start shaking it to see if it rattles.
Despite the danger of a curse on me and all my progeny, Strange Antiquities turned out to be rather cosy. An antiques shop is a great setting for a game. It’s a fairly mundane location, being little more than a counter and a load of shelves, which keeps things manageable. But it’s also full of little slices of history and folklore and, in this case, a few spoonfuls of horror. Meanwhile, there’s something spooky going on in the plot. Still, I get the feeling that Strange Antiquities is caught between two worlds, never fully committing to either.
Creepy Keepsakes
The core loop of Strange Antiquities is nice and simple. You’re an apprentice at an antique shop, which your master has left in your care. Customers will come in and request an item, and you need to give them the right one. Said items are a bunch of strange artefacts, ranging from normal to creepy. To identify them, you need to decipher the vague clues found in a series of books. This starts simple, and ramps up until you’re identifying gemstones and weird magnetic fields.
It’s a fun central mechanic and the descriptors are just vague enough that you feel smart guessing them. I especially like ones that require you to mess with the environment, like holding a candle against them. To get more artefacts, you need to explore the town by solving a series of riddles. These do range in difficulty somewhat, but are usually quite entertaining They also have the key factor of making you feel like a clever clogs. In fact, the only part that I don’t fully like about the gameplay is the punishment for getting too many things wrong. You have to play a fiddly little dice game to restart, which didn’t quite fit for me.
Raucous Ravens
While you’re fiddling around with a monkey’s paw or whatever, there are some spooky happenings going on in Strange Antiquities. Customers will tell of ravens gathering around the town, and comatose people turning up with black eyes. It adds a little dose of context to the world, which is nice to see. At certain points you’ll need to a make a decision as to which item to give a pivotal character, which will impact the overall ending. There seem to be quite a few twists here, which is great.
Though an issue with that is that Strange Antiquities has limited replay value. A new game nets the same customers, asking for the same items, so there will be a degree of repetition before getting to the choices. I also feel that Strange Antiquities doesn’t take its gameplay or story as far as it could. Identifying items becomes strangely easy by the end, due to the diminishing number of possible items, and I was hoping for more in-depth mechanics, like taking shavings or conducting detailed experiments. Something that feels more involved than just picking a relevant word from a book.
Strange Antiquities – Cosily Creepy
On the story front, the actual plot points are nice but it’s a little hampered by it all being told second-hand. Sometimes choosing which item to give is a straight-up guess. I would’ve liked the little text adventures found in the exploration to be fleshed out a bit, to give us a little more agency over things. As it is, I found myself dissolving into a stereotypical shopkeeper, barking ‘whaddya want?’ at people telling me their life stories before getting to the point. Probably not the vibe Strange Antiquities was going for.
That might have more to do with the fact that I’ve been fighting off a fever all week. Still, I enjoyed my time with Strange Antiquities. Despite the premise, and that weird antique that’s just a withered hand, it has a lot of cosy vibes. I stuck with it through the epilogue until I’d identified every item. There’s something really satisfying about a shop full of labels, where everything has its place. While I wish it had pushed itself a little further, Strange Antiquities is a short, pleasant experience with a nice dusting of horror.
