In the Forest, the Mutant Forest, Corruption Creeps Tonight
A review and game design study of Exclusion Zone Botanist
Introduction
Exclusion Zone Botanist contains one of my favorite pieces of narrative flavor I’ve ever seen in a tabletop game. The concept of this solo drawing game by Exeunt Press is that you are a botanist who’s been dropped into a dark, mutated forest in order to document the strange (and sometimes dangerous) plants you find there. The narrative flair I found myself enamored with was the rulebook’s Corruption Progression List.1
Exclusion Zone Botanist’s Corruption Progression List is a bulleted list of six stages your character goes through as they are gradually “corrupted” and mutated by the forest, leading to their eventual demise. The list contains disturbingly eerie descriptions like “The sprouts [that have erupted from your skin] become vines, wrapping around your limbs” and “The vines struggle to anchor you to the soil.”
What struck me about the Corruption Progression List was that underneath all the vivid writing, the list’s mechanical purpose is extremely simple—it’s essentially just a timer telling you how close you are to losing the game. And yet, the evocative and compelling way in which the list is written got me immensely excited to roleplay my poor character undergoing the nasty changes that the list describes.
The Corruption Progression List in Exclusion Zone Botanist is a shining example for me of the magic of solo roleplaying games—of their ability to help you imagine yourself in fascinating, fantastical situations while granting you the agency to forge your own story within a fictional world.
To commemorate my time with Exclusion Zone Botanist, I’ve written a brief review of the game along with some lessons I learned from analyzing its game design.
Is This Game for You?
If a thematic blend of science fiction and light horror (mixed with a healthy dose of botany, both real and fantastical) appeals to you and you enjoy drawing and/or writing, then you should give Exclusion Zone Botanist a look.2 It’s an excellently executed rules-lite solo game and a great way to lose yourself inside a unique and eerie world for an hour or two while flexing your creative muscles.
I enjoyed my playthrough of Exclusion Zone Botanist. It was fun imagining encounters with some of the strange, creepy, and dangerous plants depicted in the game’s oracle tables. Check out my actual play to see if Exclusion Zone Botanist might provide the kind of game experience you’re looking for: Death in the EZ.
My mission is to document as many novel forms of plant life as I can find and return to the exfil portal for pickup before I fall victim to what field agents refer to as “forest corruption,” a sort of sickness that mutates a person’s DNA and turns them into something no longer human.
Lessons from the Game Design
1. Elevating Mechanics Through Narrative Flavor
I’ve already waxed poetic about my appreciation for Exclusion Zone Botanist’s Corruption Progression List. That’s because I think it’s an excellent example of how to elevate a game’s mechanics by imbuing them with narrative flavor.
Including a basic timer system in your game? Functional. Adequate. Bland.
Telling the player that the timer is actually a list of symptoms their character experiences as they transform into a mutant tree? Intriguing. Compelling. Sublime.
2. Enhancing Replay Value Through Oracle Tables
I first discussed the idea of oracle tables as being a crucial source of worldbuilding inspiration for players in my review of another Exeunt Press game, Eleventh Beast.
I was happy to find that Exclusion Zone Botanist succeeds brilliantly in an area in which I felt Eleventh Beast fell short. Exclusion Zone Botanist’s rulebook contains several oracle tables jam-packed with detailed descriptions of fascinating plants you can encounter in your adventures.
These intriguing and evocative descriptions not only heightened my enjoyment while playing the game but also increased my desire to play again so that I could discover all of the distinct plant varieties the game has to offer.
3. Adding Mechanical Depth to a Simple Ruleset
While Exclusion Zone Botanist’s rules are fairly simple, the game finds ways to add an extra layer of mechanical depth in places where it makes narrative sense. For example, if you enter an area containing Toxic Fog, you must immediately move to a random adjacent area (to represent your running blindly away from the fog).
Solo journaling games tend to feature concise and simple rulesets because they prioritize player creativity over strategy and mechanical complexity. However, finding small ways to add coherent mechanical flourishes to a game can increase the player’s sense of engagement and narrative immersion.
Conclusion
As with just about all of Exeunt Press’s games, one of the most striking and appealing aspects of Exclusion Zone Botanist is its aesthetics. The game’s rulebook is beautifully designed and thematically immersive—from its bold, black-and-white cover depicting labyrinthine tree branches reaching ominously up from the bottom of the page; to its interior imagery consisting of blurred photos of dark, foreboding forests and ink-splattered illustrations of sinister, serpentine trees.
I appreciate the art and the writing in Exclusion Zone Botanist, both of which work in tandem to heighten the player’s sense of narrative and thematic immersion. Exclusion Zone Botanist is a game I enjoyed playing and would happily play again.
Have thoughts on Exclusion Zone Botanist or any of the game design topics I discussed above? Share them in the comments! I’d love to hear from you.
If you’re curious about the title of this post, it’s a reference to the lyrics of an American doo-wop song from the 1960s (“In the jungle, the mighty jungle / The lion sleeps tonight”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_Sleeps_Tonight.
I’m not affiliated with Exeunt Press and earn no commissions from this post.
It sounds like a wonderful game. Certainly is creepy and strange.