I want to write more about Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock) because it’s emblemtic of my gaming year. I bestowed it with an award yesterday, but it is not without its flaws. I have written several posts in which I highlight the positives and the negatives.
It has a mystery baked into it, but it’s, if you’ll pardon the pun, half-baked at best. I figured out what was going on before the denouement, and I was disappointed when it was revealed that I was right. There was no way the mystery was going to be satisfying. I knew that from the start, so I wasn’t very disappointed when it turned out to be true.
One of the biggest issues with the game wsa that there was just too much thrown into the soup. They could have taken out the mystery, the breeding of the animals (to make magical, colorful animals), and several other additions, and the game would have been just as satisfying. There is a point of oversaturation, and I think this game passed it.
Here is a quick list of activities/events/things included in the game: planting, farming, and harvesting; selling items and buying them; nurturing silk worms in order to make silk for clothing (this takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r); making clothing and selling them to Violet; mining for gems, coal, and other minerals; making jewelry and selling it to Parker (and this does not show up, really, until the very end of the game; making hair dyes and otther hair stuff for Eury (also a late game addition); fishing, making several different spells; gathering resources; amassing an amount of items for various townfolk; finding recipes; cooking; meeting with the coven every night; romancing, dating, and getting married (and then divored); figuring out the mystery; and that’s not even everything.
Oh, I forgot to mention the animals. Feeding them, finding their favorite food, and then later down the road, breeding them. As to the last, it was not clear at all how that came about, and I didn’t fully realize I was missing out for dozens of hours. I was not happy with that. At all. That’s one of my small gripes about the game–the tutorializing isn’t great.
I never liked the art style, but I accepted it at some point. I can’t remember the music, and I’m pretty sure I turned it off because I don’t like to listen to constant music as I play. The voice acting was solid, but the dialogue was thin. I have mentioned that when I played the original Hades (Supergiant Games), I still got original dialogue well past the true ending (which meant beating game ten times).
With this game, the repeat started after the first date, which was very early on. I’m not asking that every game has hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue, but I would like to get through at least a quarter of the game without hearing repeat dialogue on the regular.
I will say that another thing the game does not make clear is what the changing of the seasons entails. The coven is in charge of changing the seasons, which is an interesting conceit, but the game doesn’t make you feel like there’s any urgency in doing so. I kept the game in the first season for way too long, and it felt emotionally unsatisfying later on when I finally did change the season.
What I mean is that I was already a bit burned out by the end of the first season, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. Ideally, I would have turned the season as soon as I was able. Instead, I dawdled and did so much in the first season, it trivialized the turning.
That’s one of my big gripes about the game–the pacing is off. And that’s because they left the pacing to me. There is a big magical aspect to the game that really doesn’t get going until the second season. You get to meet the fae who are present in the world, but invisible to most people. They have their own area, and it’s charming to go to visit them in their world. The way I found out about the world was contrived and a bit cringe-worthy, but I accept that it was supposed to be whimsical.
I liked the fae for the most part. One in particular really intrigued me because she was from Asia (I presumed), tortured, and complicated. She was prickly and snappish, but she also cared deeply for my grandmother. They were in a relationship, though the details were sketchy. She was not romanceable, unfortunately. Another, Westley, was romanceable, and he was my favorite. He was also a werewolf, which was made pretty clear from the start.
Another frustrating thing about the game was that it was not always clear how to prock the cut-scenes that indicated you were moving from one stage of a relationship to another. There were best guesses, but some of them didn’t work. Sometimes, it was just a matter of me trying over and over again in slightly different ways before I finally tripped over the right answer. I still did not know what triggered certain events, exactly, nor do I really care now.
I included the trailer for the romances above, and it was something I found incredibly frustrating in the game. It felt both intensive and thin at the same time. You had to figure out what foods your intended like best, and that was mostly trial and error. You could scry it out, but that felt like cheating. It didn’t stop me from doing it, though. And, one of the two who hooked up with each other at the end of the first season was the hardest to get her favorite food. You did not get the recipes for two or three of them until way late in the game.
There’s a tension in games that is a delicate balance between quests that are fun and quests that are burdensome. I enjoyed getting to know the different townsfolk in this game, but I did not enjoy the romancing. In fact, if I hadn’t been trying to get the achievement for marrying all the romanceable people, I would have stuck with Kim (Erika Ishii’s character), Eury, and Westley. Maybe Amira. Kim was the first one I romanced, and that was because they were Asian and nonbinary. I divorced them because I got tired of the relationship at the end of the first season, and as I mentioned before, in the very next scene, they were in a relationship with Amira.
That made me laugh, but it really came back to bite me in the butt when I decided I wanted to get the achievement for marrying all of the original romanceable characters (Eury came later and was not included in that group.) Westley was my absolute favorite, so I saved him for last. The problem was that by the end of the game, I was so tired of all the dialogue, I was over him. I mean, he was still one of my top two favorite characters, but I had heard his dialogue umpteen times at that point, and I was done with it.
Eury came late in the game, and she really captured my heart. If it weren’t for Westley, I would have stayed married to her for the rest of the game. Another thing that annoyed me was that you could not be polyamorous in the game. Why can’t I date more than one person at a time? In fact, if you accept a date with one character and decide to be in a relationship with that person, you permanently cut off all other possibilities–until you get divorced.
Then, everyyone romanceable is back on the menu, boys! And it’s as if you never stopped flirting with them. And it’s the same thing over and over again.
I want to be clear. I loved spending time in this game. I am glad that it went for it all, even if it was too much for me. I cannot wait to see what the /sequel/prequel, Wylde Society will have to offer.