Reaching for Petals

Though I'm leaning towards recommending this, I will say if there was a middling "maybe" option I'd go for that. Reaching for Petals is a weird situation of a game. It's moreso an art project than a game to start with, as you don't really do anything that matters within the span of about an hour that the story unfolds. The voiceover is soothing and nice to listen to, and you may get a feeling of introspection while going through the game. The story is, for the most part, told through some environmental storytelling plus some metaphors told in the voiceover, save for the in between memories as well as the final few minutes. I will say that it did win me over towards the end, and made me fairly emotional. Overall tough I'd say the game mostly shines in the environment it presents, this vast expanse of nature accompanied by calming music and the occasional voiceover. It's all pretty pleasant to walk through, and since it's very much a walking simulator without any additional gimmicks, that's pretty much all you do, and damn if it wasn't a pleasant walk in nature. However, the game is also fairly buggy, or extremely not optimized in any way. I have a fairly good pc, but the loading times were insane, sometimes taking close to 5 minutes, both between scenes and even within a single landscape textures and lighting kept bugging in and out of existence at random, or loading at the very last minute. The walking was, to be fair, not laggy, but if I tried to run anything else on another monitor performance across everything dropped dramatically. This, paired with the loading times, was pretty disruptive. Also, the journals achievement was bugged for me, and according to other reviews it seems to be so for many others as well. So if you're a completionist you should probably steer clear. To me, it was more so an annoyance than a big deal, but still. In the end, as I said, it's a mixed bag. If it was at a higher price, I might have made a more negative review. But, for a 5 euro game, it's fair. It's a good enough walking simulator with soothing, introspective narration and a sad but deeply human story, that offers around an hour of gameplay.