Having received Flow Match for free from winning a prize draw, I feel obligated to recommend this game. But having also actually completed the game, I feel obligated NOT to recommend it due to some pretty glaring flaws.
First, though, a gameplay description: Flow Match is a game where you push around crates to form a single unbroken line of crates from one recess in the wall to the other. The first 10 levels are pretty vanilla, the next five involve multiple floors (crates are connected through the floor and ceiling), and the last five involve controlling two characters at once.
The first flaw is obviously that this game is clearly a 2D Sokoban game, but it's rendered in 3D, putting unnecessary strain on my computer's resources. I'd have been happier if this were a Pascal program using only the command prompt, or whatever. (In fact, Unity does have 2D engine capability from what I recall, so I don't see why the developer chose to make it in "glorious 3D" when it's really just a bunch of cubes.)
The second one is its length. As you can see from the statistics on my review, I've only played the game 35 minutes and completed it in that time; as I've stated, the game is only 20 levels long. Even for a cost of 0.63 GBP, the current on-sale price of this game as I write this, that's really not enough, unless the game is made very well (like klocki or Zenge, both short games with higher prices than I think they should normally have). Which, as I shall expound on, it isn't.
Given that this is a Sokoban game, one would expect there to be puzzle-softlock situations, so surely the developer had the foresight to put in an undo hotkey or an undo button, right? Wrong. There is no "undo" function, meaning that a single misstroke of a key requires a level restart... which can only be done by moving the mouse! That's right, there's no level restart hotkey either! It's 2016; this should be a staple in all puzzle games!
The gameplay during the first 10 levels already gets boring by the fifth. None of the levels are particularly interesting, hard, or anything else. By the 8th level, it's just a trudge through the same old, same old. It's clear this game wasn't playtested by anyone who actually plays puzzles regularly.
The next five levels, which involve multiple floors, have a few annoyances. First, you can't see all floors at once (meaning that you sometimes have to push blocks out of the way, perhaps unknowingly softlocking yourself, just to see the whole level). Second, to go from one floor to another, one steps on an arrow and is immediately transported to the next floor; this causes unnecessary switching between floors every time one needs to walk past an arrow to access a different area on the same floor. I would have implemented it so that a keypress (perhaps X, if Z is used for undo) is required to switch floors. Now, [url=http://www.puzzlescript.net/]I wonder what game engine allows for 2D grid movement, Sokoban boxes, undos, and a separate button for action[/url]?
At least one level has more cubes than is required. Remember how I said that the crates have to form a single unbroken line? Well, apparently even if all the cubes are joined and there is indeed a single unbroken line from one recess to the other, the game doesn't recognize that as a solution some of the cubes "branch off" said line! That is to say, the game forces the player to use an "suboptimal" solution. But this fact can only be found out on the last level of the multiple-floors set, which is already finicky enough as-is. You can imagine my frustration when I "solved" the level with fewer cubes than necessary. If I were designing this game, I would have put this nuance as one of the first puzzles in the game, where the player is expected to have not yet known all the rules! Then, I would have built a good half of my levels around avoiding multiple paths
Anyway, onto the last five levels; you control both players simultaneously and need to complete two puzzles on two boards. Good twist, but again; none of the puzzles were particularly challenging, illuminating, or [b]fun[/b]. That's the main gripe I have with the levels in this game.
Now, besides the puzzles and graphics, there is also the story. And the story is not particularly memorable. It's just about some guy whose girlfriend vanishes after he discloses some secret or another, so he makes his way through a desert and a castle, and escapes with his girlfriend. Pretty boring.
Hang on, that seems almost completely irrelevant to the gameplay! Yes, I get that you needed some form of challenge to drive the story, but the story needs to drive the gameplay as well! You don't give us any sort of reason why we should care about pushing boxes around in, what, a desert presumably? The last level, where the two escape from the castle against advancing guards, was by far the most relevant one to the actual story! You could have made a whole game out of that, and expanded the story! Or you could have scrapped the story altogether and just gave us a set of interesting link-Sokoban levels! (under the admittedly weak premise that you're a robot connecting wires in a factory. I'm not too fussy so long as the story's relevant.)
Maybe I'm being overly-critical (the game certainly isn't as bad as some of the games I've played, like Duplexer, May's Mysteries, or Rolling Shapes, and actually is playable), but this whole game seems to have been made very poorly and lazily. Almost zero effort has actually gone into the level design (save maybe two levels in the multiple-floors section), no effort has gone into making the controls aid the gameplay, by the lack of undo button or keyboard shortcuts, and little effort has gone into fusing the story with the gameplay itself.
All in all, a game with mediocre puzzles, subpar controls, and a bland story; and it's too short to bother with. It's not worth your money or the hassle of refunding it.
EDIT 28/10/2016: To show that this game had a lot more potential than its creator placed into it, I have created a demake of this game, which I shortly introduce here [link removed]. If you played this game (Flow Match) and felt disappointed, maybe my demake can at least restore some faith in this game's mechanic.
EDIT 15/12/2016: I've just been informed by a friend that the first 12 levels are available online, for free, on [url=http://www.kongregate.com/games/antarsoft/flow-match]Kongregate[/url]. Please, if you feel like this is a game you want to spend your money on, I greatly urge you to at least try out this demo first so that you can see how drudgerous it is. Note that this demo was published on 13/07/2015, meaning that the developer took over a year to finish making his game. (For comparison, I finished making my demake of the game in a month.)
EDIT 28/12/2016: I've just been informed by a friend that my original introduction to my demake of this game has been deleted by the developer of Flow Match. Developer, this does not reflect well on you at all. You should be ashamed that you are censoring valid criticism and relevant discussion. I've reposted the introduction and updated the link.
EDIT 09/01/2017: I've just been informed by Steam that I've been banned from this game's forums, and that thread has been deleted, without any ban reasons whatsoever given. Draw from that what conclusions you will, though I would say that any developer who knows a thing about PR should very well know that censoring people in this way is only going to encounter the Streisand effect.
Anyway, [url=http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=8c9b5464776965faf6a15b83507786ee]here[/url] is my demake of the game. Great thanks go to Jack Lance, who helped with a good deal of the programming and optimization. Other thanks go to my playtesters for their feedback. It should be noted that all levels in my demake are completely original. No level that appears in my game also appears in Flow Match.
