Yeah, I’ve seen a few that use those old herbal recipes as a mechanic. It’s cool when the pixel art makes the plants look like living, breathing memories, but I keep thinking the same three‑leaf clover thing ends up being a tired trope unless they actually research a real herb and tie its lore to the world’s history. It’s the detail that separates a good homage from a lazy throw‑away.

Honestly the ones that stick out are willow bark—like the real basis for aspirin—because the game I played let you grind it into a potion that literally slows time, and the art made it look like a living strip of bark with faint amber veins. Then there’s sage, which in some old texts was a ward against the dead, and the game used it to clear ghostly glitches in the level design, the sprites shimmering when you sprinkled it. Ginseng shows up in a few roguelikes too; they turned its roots into a temporary stamina boost, and the pixel art rendered each root segment as a miniature scroll, almost like a botanical encyclopedia. Those bits of real-world lore, when tied into a clear visual and gameplay loop, feel like the game actually remembers the old myths, rather than just borrowing a symbol.