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Flowearty Review

Rating:

Flowearty follows in the tradition of games like Crayon Physics, but instead of drawing shapes, you copy and paste existing geometry to reach the goal. However, the inadequate instructions betray this clever mechanic and make learning to play difficult.

Full Review

Flowearty is created by Elday for the Experimental Gameplay Project's theme for April - Repeat. In the game, you play a flower in search of its stem, and the way you go about it is basically to copy and paste surrounding geometry to forge a path towards the goal. After the path is created, click on the edges of the flower (i.e. on the petals) to nudge the flower in that direction. The mechanic is brilliant in my opinion, and has endless potential waiting to be explored, however, the game suffers from two major faults that prevent this potential from being fully realized.

The first problem is the lack of comprehensive instructions - the game tries hard to instruct you on how to play it using a series of images and text, but the result remains very ambiguous, and the usage of programmer-ey terms such as "buffer" throw the game into further inaccessibility. I took a long time to figure out that I actually also copied empty spaces, which can be used to act like an eraser. The game jumped a star in my head when I figured that out, but immediately lost it again when I remembered how long it took me to find out.

The second problem was the repetitive level design. I was bored by the time I reached the 4th level, because the same solutions can be applied over and over again with minor variations. The game can be improved by constantly challenging the player's pre-formed solutions - once he or she is comfortable copying-and-pasting ground towards the goal, mess with that and add geometry you cannot copy, or worm-ridden soil that will destroy the flower.

The graphics of this game feels clean, simple and pleasant. Out of pure serendipity, the results of repeatedly copying and pasting can produce some very beautiful abstract landscapes made up of Mondrian rectangles. Audio-wise, there is a strange machine-like sound akin to a camera that plays when you copy and paste geometry, which feels out of place amongst the visual greenery presented.

However, the game is still a worthy download due to its fascinating mechanic. I hope more levels can be made to explore this idea, because it can be an interesting indie masterpiece if carefully handled. If you understand Russian, more information can be found on Elday's site, or you can just download the Windows version here.

Posted by Zhou Xuanming on May 03, 2010 Comments (2)


Almost said at 2010-05-03 04:20:

JumpCopyPaste has the same copying of parts of the level but has more interesting gameplay to use it. (Puzzle platforming and enemy avoidance) http://www.hempuli.com/blogblog/archives/65

I found the movement of the flower head to be ridiculously slow, especially because the game forces me to wait a couple of seconds before I can "nudge" it again.


Zhou Xuanming said at 2010-05-03 09:36:

Oh I wasn't aware of that game, thank you for bringing it up! I'll be sure to give it a look over here.

Yes, the game is excruciatingly slow. I think its because they wanted to prevent players from spamming clicks on the flower, but it wasn't the most elegant of solutions.