Distant Bloom

This game was soooo beautiful, I really liked how you could see the land become restore, If you like nature and plants, you should play this game :)

种花家来种花啦，愿世界和平，大家平安喜乐。 The Flower-Planting Family has come to plant flowers, wishing for world peace and for everyone to be safe and happy.

Unfortunately, the very promising alpha I played did not end up becoming nearly as good of a full release. While the graphics, premise, and core gameplay of revitalising the planet were good, I experienced a number of visual glitches of plants phasing in and out of rocks as well as the character being turned away from animals they are meant to be petting. About 2/3s into the game I stopped getting quests which I'm not sure was intended that way or not. Most egregiously, however is the navigation that other reviewers have also mentioned. I'm generally bad with navigation in games but this game takes the cake in terms of inaccessibility and frustration. You only get to know what region you are in with no more precise location indicator and paths seem deliberately stretched and difficult to manoeuvre, especially due to the fact that you can't jump. Trying to remember what area you still need to clear, and having to double back several times as you upgrade your cleaning tool was incredibly frustrating and grating. I really wanted to love the game and finish it but I just couldn't. If they had a bit more polish as honestly the alpha had less bugs than the full game, better fast travel, and precise map locations, this could have been brilliant. Unfortunately it also seems like the developers have stopped working on the project, shame.

I want to like the game so much. It's a fun little cozy game where you explore and clear out pollution and terraform. The gameplay is simple and chill, and it's fun to poke around and see what's around the next corner BUUUUUT it is so damn easy to soft lock in this game.. There doesn't seem to be sufficient redundancy in quest triggers and they can be interrupted. If you don't pause and let the quests complete and the next one trigger, if you run too fast and change screens or click too fast you can interrupt the next quest from triggering and then you're soft locked. Even if you find "the next thing" you can never retrigger that quest again and your game is now corrupt. To make matters worse because it uses an autosave method, you can't even just back up 5 minutes to get it to trigger properly. The upside is the game isn't very long so it's not like you're losing that much content. The downside is the game isn't really worth a replay and a cozy game should never be so frustrating.

Overall, I love the cozy gameplay. The characters, art style and environments are gorgeous and fun. Sadly I am currently discouraged from continuing to play due to the map system (I can’t see my location on the map nor the maze-like roads I have already unlocked). I don’t have the best memory so unfortunately the current map for people like me can be confusing. Adding a little glowing trail that our character can follow if the map system is too confusing (that we could turn on in the settings if needed) would be cool to see. I keep getting “dead ends” between areas that I cannot clear up yet, while trying to find one of the probes, which keeps me from advancing in the story. Hopefully I’ll find that current probe I’m stuck on some day. 😭

Super cute game about cleaning up environments from different types of pollution and planting cohesive plants to help the place flourish. It's also about healing old wounds and making a home for yourself/your family. Quick game, good mechanics, fair achievements, great music and art.

Very feathery around the edges but it's one of those games where you turn corrupted pockets of dead ground into flourishing pastures and that's never a bad time.