This is part two of my official review for Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock). Ignore the several posts I have written prior that have the words ‘official’ and ‘review’ in the title because those were just the musings of an obsessed mind. I would like to continue from where I left off in the last post, which you can read here.
At the end of the previous post, I was talking about the robots that made life so much easier. I would have liked to get them earlier, but I can’t complain too much as I got them in the third season. In my first playthrough, I stayed in the first season for far too long. In my second playthrough, I think I made it to the third season more quickly than I made it to the second playthrough on my first.
There are always a ton of videos on things you should know before playing a game (oftentimes titled, “Things I wish I knew”, but I never watch them. I like to go into games as unspoiled as possible. I did know about the magic before going in, but that’s not really a spoiler as it’s in the trailer. And you find out really early on that your grandmother is a witch and so are you.
The tension between wanting to play a game unspoiled and not wanting to miss shit has been something I’ve dealt with since I started playing the first Dark Souls. It came to a head during the third game of the series when I fell in love with Yuria and would do anything she wanted. I did something unrelated to her (and I had to try it becuase it was something new), and the next time I tried to talk to her, she soundly rebuffed me. Then, she disappeared from my game and never showed up again. This was fairly early in the game, and I was devastated.
I contemplated starting over, but I decided to continue–albeit with hurt and anger in my heart. That was the moment when I decided that I would do some judicious looking up when things like this came around.
In this case, it didn’t really help beacuse I still made a decision that came back to bite me in the butt later on (when thinking about the plat). This is why I don’t like platinums/achievements. If I’m far away from it by the time the game ends (platinum/hunderd percenting), then I can just ignore it. If I’m anywhere close to the plat, then I’m going to go for it.
I think one of the perpetual issues with games such as this one is how to balance the grind. Is the beginning of the game, you’re always as weak as a kitten. You can barely take two steps without falling over. You have to replenish your energy in one way or another. In this game, it’s by eating/drinking. When you start doing magic, you have to replenish your magic bar, too. Your mana, if you will.
When I was doing the mining, I could do maybe ten swings of my pickaxe (the basic one) before needing to replenish my energy. Each rock took three hits to crack, so you do the math. It was irritating, and I didn’t find it fun or engaging.
In my second playthrough, I had all the money, which meant I had all the food. So, yes, I still had to stop every ten chops, but I could keep going with several food items. And, I had what I needed to upgrade my tools more quickly.
I’m going to just say it–having to grind like that isn’t enjoyable. I’m not picking on this game because most life sims are like that, but they don’t have to be. They really don’t. This is a point that I want to make about any and all genres. You don’t have to do what everyone else in the genre does. You really don’t.
Take soulslikes. FromSoft was a breath of fresh air for many people when they came out with Demon’s Souls over a decade ago. They became a gold standard action adventure games that didn’t hold your hand, had esoteric lore that you had to piece together in a variety of ways, and nails-hard bosses.
Now, a decade later, a soulslike has become a game with hard bosses and all you can do is parry them to death. Ugh. Boring.
But I digress. In the life sim/farming genre, the trope is that you have to grind all day long for the first several hours of the game. I remember when I first tried out Stardew Valley (Concerned Ape). I felt like I could do maybe three things a day before collapsing in fatigue. I rarely made it back home because I would get tired out in the middle of the field or whatever.
I do wonder if I’d like it better now, but I can’t be stuffed to go back and play it. I don’t know if I even have it on Steam. I used different clients back in the day. I do have it on Steam.I played it in June of 2017 for 45 minutes. Dang. I really did not give it a chance, did I? I know people play it still to this day and adore it. I may give it a chance, but not right now.
I think less is more in this case. I appreciate all the content in this game, but it could have easily been two games. Or, it could have been pruned down. It did not need farming AND cooking AND dating AND building things/fixing things AND taking care of farm animals AND witchy stuff AND solving a mystery AND making clothing AND doing hair stuff.
Look, I realize that a lot of this was added at the behest of the community, which I really respect. I love a dev who cares so much about their community, they will take their concerns to heart. And their wants. And it’s very sweet that the last update was to fix something that was pointed out quite early on as a hallmark of the community–but it was broken.
If there’s one word I could give this game–it’s heart. There’s so much of it that even when I am chafing at all the stuff I have to do, I cannot deny that at the core, this game is so warm and generous. In fact, I would say that’s one of the reasons I kept going. I really liked the community and the inhabitants (most of them). It was so inclusive and diverse, and they were accepting of each other’s quirks (for the most part).
But, it also tackled the sticky issue of a community turning on what they perceived as outsiders. Granted, it was a very gentle tackling, but a tackling, nonetheless. And, yes, they used witches as the stand-in, but it could have been about anyone deemed an outsider.
I think if I had played the game just once, I would have a much warmer feeling for it than I did by the end of my second playthrough. That’s my own fault, though, as I said earlier. This is one of my favorite games I’ve played this year, and I will most certainly mention it in my end-of-the-year awarrds.