The Flower Collectors

Short but great game :D

Nice little mystery based on real struggles from the world battle against fascism. Just as important to this day.

Love this game! I was about to comment how simplistic the game was but then I got the "Rookie" achievement, and that peeked my interest to play it again and get all the stories. I also love how the faschies review-bombed this game, major L-MAO. Anyway, what I hope is for the game to offer Spanish, or maybe Catalan voice-acting? That may resolve some parts of the dialogue that was too cheesy/hammy - I think that's coz of translation issues in the script writing. And, the motions of NPCs are janky a lot of times, but that's a minor issue for me.

Great game, quite immersive, clever storytelling and superbly made. Big recommendation!

I haven't completed this game yet, but here are my thoughts thus far. Positives: love the storyline and the brooding main character. I appreciate the back story and feel connected to what is happening. Negatives: cannot reccomend for someone with motion sickness like me! I realllyyy struggle to play unfortunately, fighting nausea all the way. In connection with this, WHY can you not save the game?! This is a horrible decision and left me in a tricky spot, when I was at my limit and felt like I was going to throw up from the motion sickness due to the games constant movement, I couldn't quit or I would lose my progress for the chapter and I do not have any desire to have to replay. I left my laptop running with the game on for over an hour while my nausea passed, laptop getting increasingly hot. When I was ready to face it again I felt a deep resentment and desperation for the chapter to be over. Now that I am finally released, I feel I don't personally want to pick it back up again, maybe not ever. I know these are personal gripes which is why I have said YES, I reccomend this game, but it's just not for me!

This game is a fantastic example of how a good heart and central design ethos can help a story shine through despite severely limited surface-level constraints. The Flower Collectors does not look incredible, visually. I am a big sucker for games/movies that use animal characters in otherwise completely realistic and grounded settings. Still, the character designs and animations in this title are extremely limited. They are definitely stylized; it is not that the look is not distinctive. It is clear, though that the visual presentation, while quaint, is not the main draw here. Despite all of that, I found this game to be an absolute delight and a real diamond in the rough. Like many good narrative adventure games, I came away from it having learned a little something about history and a different part of the world, and that is extremely satisfying. The themes that it deals with are extremely relevant (almost shockingly so) today. Like the graphics, the gameplay is also fairly limited; you never leave your apartment. The entirety of the game consists of you rolling around your tiny studio flat and its balcony, snooping on the activity on your surrounding block and making some timed choices on where to look and what to say. While that may not sound incredibly exciting, I found it a refreshingly novel way to tell an excellent story about change, revolution, and the courage to do the right thing. One of my firmest held beliefs in game design is that games (or really any kind of art, really) are more interesting when they can transport the player and make them feel something while working within strict constraints. It is why I find so many big and splashy triple-A titles with massive maps and possibility spaces to be boring these days. Games like The Flower Collectors pull from a very limited cupboard of ingredients. Simple graphics. Simple animations. Only a few voiced characters. A tiny map and limited gameplay options. And yet it still manages to create a memorable and affecting experience. That is far more impressive to me than any multi-million dollar title that looks expensive and feels soulless. The one word of caution that I would have is about the length; everyone needs to make their own cost/value judgment on their game purchase decisions, but I am not sure that I would have called this a great value at the full price of $14.99. Grabbing it for $6 on sale felt perfect for its nearly 4-hour runtime.

Rough around the edges, but still manages to execute well enough on its core premise and gameplay loop. Yeah, the animations are rigid, blend trees and a few extra animations would have gone along way to increasing immersion, but the core idea and story of the game is what made it enjoyable. Starting off, I was not a fan of the protagonist, they did a decent job selling him as a grumpy ex-cop who worked under a dictator right wing police force. It would have been nice to have a bit more time, or something more to further show his perception change throughout the years, but within the chapters they did a decent enough job. Having the game spent on the balcony looking over the street is a premise I have enjoyed in other titles. A few times however I was a bit disappointed; for example, it would ask the player to guide a character through the street avoiding the police. I would tell them when the coast was clear. As they were moving from point A to B, the police would turn around and the character would CLEARLY walk in front of the police. These faux stealth parts were a bit of a bummer. The tension at moments were good. Unravelling the mystery was engaging, albeit completely predictable from the start as to whodunit. I do wish, they were a little less n the nose about that, but in any case for a short 2.5 hour long game, I enjoyed my time on this old mans balcony.

The setting is very promising, but the game mechanics and dialogues are not up to the task, in my opinion. This is a detective game inspired by Firewatch. So I was hoping for something similar to Her Story (investigation), Firewatch or other narrative games. However, the investigation aspect is very frustrating because of limiting game mechanics. It's incredibly railroady. Every tiny action has to be undertaken in a pre-decided order. Dialogue starts at decided times, and does not merge with action smoothly as in Firewatch. You can't take a picture while chatting : you go through conversation, then take a required picture when the game prompts you to. Initiatives are not rewarded, and you are not free to go through investigation in the order you would like. The invisible hand of the developer is always here, in the form of a constant to-do list on the screen... which breaks immersion for me. (deviations from the to-do list, in nature or order, are not allowed). Some tasks are also on a timer for no apparent reason, although the rest of the game is not in real time. More immersion-breaking. For an investigative game, it also assumes its players are dumb. Assembling the evidence and coming to conclusions is guided to the point you do not need to think whatsoever. Assembling evidence is done on a big board. There are empty slots, labelled with easy questions, for example "what does the victim look like ?". The player has to pick a picture of the victim and stick it there, that's it. If the wrong photograph is chosen, the game will not let you stick it, so the player can win by trial and error and basic reading ability. Finally, the narrative aspect is not here either, in my opinion... Dialogues are a bit cliché and not very believable. I did not finish the game, but from what I've seen on videos, the ending is generic. I find it disappointing for such an ambitious setting. The good parts are : - interesting premise - beautiful graphics - good voice acting

The premise of the game is nothing new in movies but it seemed like an interesting idea for a game. Unfortunately it ended up being closer to a point and click. The story is simple and straight forward. Given the subject matter, it leaves a lot to be desired. This game is meant to be serious and address serious issues, I was having an incredibly hard time taking it seriously solely because of the animations. The animations, out of everything, are what left the worst impression. The animations come across as lazy and unpolished, frequently not matching the situation that’s currently playing out before your eyes. (Ex: the police “punch” a character but the animation is of them stomping. The character getting “punched” just lays down on the ground like Apu spills his tendies) I would argue that animations are just as important as story and worth the time and money to make them look clean, polished, and at the very least convincing. Clearly, all the animations were taken from Mixamo because I recognize a bunch of them. There were no in-betweens so characters would snap, slide, blend into their next animation. The fingers frequently don’t animate correctly. (Ex: hands go into an “ok” position and they bend back like hot dogs) The devs did not spend enough time on the character movements as the characters are often sliding around during walk and run animations. All of this just really took me out of the experience. It’s hard to connect with what’s happening when you’ve got characters that are over the top animating like the Sims. (Ex: Main big bad villain waving at the bouncer with one leg up like a schoolgirl) Unfortunately the story and the game play are just ok and are not enough to make me look past the, honestly, comedic animations. I feel like the making of this game was a bit rushed. With more time and dedication to all aspects of development (particularly animation), this could have been a better game.

Short and pretty easy detective game. But it has a very captivating story and great voice work.