Flowereverie

A deceptively deep puzzle game that explores the concept of a world where words have power. You learn new abilities by rearranging the letters used in various flowers. Each new flower you find is a new set of letters your can try to arrange and each new word you can make out of those letters is a new ability that can help you alter those letters into even more new words or open up areas in the world. This compounds quickly as you'll have to use multiple abilities and even multiple flowers to craft complex words to find more flowers and so on. While this is nominally a game about spelling words, it avoids the pitfalls of similar games through clever use of mechanics that keep it rooted in puzzle. The game never requires the player to actually know how to spell something and mechanically the game would function perfectly if all the letters were abstracted into alien runes. It is a puzzle game above all else and a challenging one at that.

The premise of manipulating words and letters to spell spells really intrigued me. It hits that sweet spot of making me stay up late and figure out the puzzles. The UX and visuals are a little wonky in some areas, but I stick with it because the puzzles are clever. This game makes me feel the way Baba Is You does -- I want to tear out my hair until the lightbulb moment happens. Then I feel like a genius.

Unable to play without the game taking over the entire screen which with these graphics is entirely unnecessary, not even the system defaults for leaving full-screen respond. Posted for assistance in the discussion forum, no reply for 2 weeks. May look again in the future, but refunding for now.

This is a fun game, full stop. The concept is unique and interesting, and the puzzle mechanics are fresh, addictive, and extremely brain bending. The music is also surprisingly addictive. If you're a fan of puzzle games, you owe it to yourself to give this game a shot! It's cheap, and already very worth it even though it's early in early access.

I love games with simple mechanics but complex interactions. Some amazing games in that list would include Portal, Braid, The Witness, and Paquerette. Flowereverie definitely deserves an honorable mention. The core concept is simple: transform a word with a set of unlockable transformations to uncover substrings that form new words. But as your list of transformations grow and the target words get longer and longer, you quickly realize how devilishly complex this simple task becomes... While the graphics and overall polish leave much to be desired (note: this review was written during Early Access), the game and ALL its puzzles are entirely playable, and honestly that's ALL you really need. So what are you waiting for? Pull out some CASH and go GRAB and PLAY this game!

Flowereverie is all about transformation puzzles. You're given a sequence (in this case, of letters representing the name of a flower) and a number of different moves, and the aim is to transform it into another sequence (in this case representing the name of a magic spell). Since these are 99% of the game play, it really comes down to: if you like transformation puzzles, you'll like this game. If you don't, you won't. Putting the puzzles in context, though, is a rather clever metroidvania-like RPG mechanic. At first, each new spell you gain either adds a new transformation move to puzzles, or opens up a new way of traversing the game world, which lets you access more options and potentially more lore. The lore, based on exploring a strange town which seems to host a flower-based cult, is quite interesting even though awkwardly written (you can literally find a book labelled "fake history"). But I say "at first" because there's a big snag. After a fairly short time, Flowereverie runs into a difficulty wall with the addition of a transformation that combines together two flower names together in any position. This means that rather than goal-oriented exploration, the puzzle experience starts with attempting to intuit which combination and at what point will yield something that you can apply further transformations to, out of a huge number of potential combinations. Guess wrong, and the whole puzzle is hopeless, but you won't know that. Compounding this is that, at the same point in the play, you already have most of your world traversal spells, so there isn't much new exploration to unlock. You'll either get a new transformation which makes selecting the right combination even harder, or just another puzzle - sometimes accompanied by lore, sometimes not. There are multiple times when you can create a spell only to be told that it isn't enough or won't work and that you need to immediately provide another. On top of that, by that stage the game has introduced a huge number of potential spells to learn. Most of them will be impossible until you have more moves available, but the game doesn't tell you that, so you may end up working away at a puzzle that you can't actually do at all. There is a hint feature which suggests what you should attempt next, but it doesn't always directly say what the next puzzle needed is, meaning that you're still never sure what you're doing is possible. There are a few minor problems as well, but these might be resolved by early access. The RPG graphics are clearly standard assets and the solver screen is rather blocky, but these are mentioned by the author in the description as for correction. The solver screen also strangely zooms into one corner whenever a message appears, which can be a bit disorienting. Later, when you unlock a move which removes any previously created spell's text from the current sequence, the game will show you when one exists to be removed but there's no way to view the range of existing spells in order to plan ahead without exiting the solver screen and losing all your progress. Which is why I say, ignore all the RPG and plot trappings - if you want a collection a collection of transformation puzzles, starting easy and getting incredibly difficult, this will be exactly what you want. At that point, the graphics are largely irrelevant. But as a general purpose RPG, I can't see it continuing to be appealing once the difficulty hits the wall.

The core puzzle gameplay is both ingenious and fun; I may or may not have stayed up until 3 am working on one of them. There are a few small non-gamebreaking bugs and the graphics aren't top tier, but they didn't really impact my enjoyment of the game.

I have spent the past 5 hours making no progress in the current puzzle 10/10 As a fan of word games this one hits the spot of rearranging letters and trying to see the edit distance from the flowers you have to the words you need. Not for everyone but if you are a certain type of word gamer you will be engrossed.