This is going to be my actual review of Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock). Yes, I know I’ve said it before and then meandered all over the place, but I mean it this time. Here is yesterday’s post on how I’m resentfully playing through the game again just to get the one relationship (and the one achievement) I didn’t get in my first playthrough.
I have to say that knowing all the story beats and what I need to do in which seasons in order to do thing s expediently is such a big help. So is having an infinite amount of money. At the very start of this playthrough, it was so painful to buy anything because I had no gold. I had forgotten how so very little you have at the beginning at the game because I was used to having millions of gold.When I discovered the fish finger trick*, I never thought about price again.
A certain older and eccentric character sells odds and ends in the forest on the daily. I’m used to just buying everything they have because it’s almost literally pennies. Not being able to buy, say, three coconuts for under a hundred gold was a shocker.
I started doing the fish finger trick as quickly as possible. At first, it was only two or three here and there. Then, it was ten at a time, Soon, it was a hundred. And then it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to the millions that I have in the bank now.
I love this option. Really. I’m sure there are people who decry it, but you can turn on ’embargo’ in the options so you can’t sell the fish fingers if you don’t want to. I think this is a great choice that the devs have given to the player.
Look. Cozy games can be such grinds. This is like a core component of many cozy games. And at least personally, it’s rarely something I look forward to doing. Even in my favorite games. Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games) was an emotional gem, but, boy, did the grind get to me. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I haven’t gone back to the game after 100%ing it (and the DLC). The idea of starting over from the beginning? Hell, no. It has no appeal for me at all. But I’ve done everything there is to do in the game, so there’s no point picking up from where I left off, either.
Once I’m done with Wylde Flowers, I will not be going back to it. In fact, there’s only one cozy game I played well past ‘beating’ it. That would be Cozy Grove (Spry Fox), and that was because it had different things (insects, flowers, trees, fish, etc.) in different seasons, and each season lasted two real-world months. And a day in the game was equal to a day in the real world.
In general though, I play FromSoft games as my “I need to chill” games. Not the first time through, obviously, but by the time I have hit my twelfth playthrough of Elden Ring, it was comfort gaming at its finest.
I don’t know why I don’t consider cozy games to be comfort gaming in the sense of a game I will play over and over again. Thinking about it, I do think the grind factor is a big part of it. My absolute favorite indie/cozy game…hm. Can I call it a cozy game? I’m not entirely sure I can. It’s Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall), and it does not have the hallmarks of a cozy game.
Having said that, I’m not sure I can accurately define a cozy game. I would say that there is a lot of management, and there is some kind of life sim going on. A lot of resource gathering is involved as is the management of interpersonal relationships. Lots of buying and selling, and lots of tedious fetch quests. Yes, I’m bitter! Making me go back and forth several times or only able to brew one potion at a time is bullshit.
I understand that a dev doesn’t want to let you feel OP at the beginning of a game, but there’s a fine line between what’s reasonable and what isn’t. The problem is that I don’t know how to clearly define it, but I can tell once a dev crosses the line. In this game. there is a time when Tara (the main character) is finding out that she’s a witch and what that means. This isn’t a secret, so I don’t feel bad for talking about it.
There’s a sacred circle where the witches gather every night at seven. Right now, I don’t have my broom so I have to run there. By the way, I hate the need to repeatedly make and cast the speed incantation. Also the ‘small things come to me’ incantation (so I don’t have to pick up every single goddamn item from the ground). They both have stronger incantations that last longer, but I feel like once you learned them, it should be automatic.
These are things that really don’t need to be in the game because it’s just filler. It’s fine the first few times, but by the millionth time, it’s bullshit. Same with the levitation spell. I have to cast one every time I want to teleport on my broom (once I get it, which I think is at the beginning of the next season), which–come on. Just fucking let me do it without casting the spell because again, it’s filler. In my other game, I have over 600 of the spells because I always have more than I need, but it shows how pointless it is.
I think it would be a gift to the genre if devs would just calm down with their resource management. We all like that stuff in the game, but I think there needs to be a dialing back of how much management there is. In this game alone, there is farming,cooking, sewing, searching for resources, chopping trees, mining rocks/gems, romancing one of more than a half-dozen characters, making friends with a dozen others, doing witchy stuff, building things, and solving a mystery.
There’s making jewelry and making it possible to have magical clothing and hair. And to be able to change your hairstyle late in the game. By the way, the character who comes late in the game along with the hair salon is easily one of my two favorite romanceables, and I am proud that I figured out the mystery surrounding that person fairly easily.
This was not the review, to no one’s surprise. I’ll get to it tomorrow.
*buying two ingredients that cost a total of 35 gold, turning them into a fish finger and selling it for 100 gold–and doing this by the thousands at a time means never having to worry about money again.