IndieFlux.com

Every once in a thousand years a game comes along that redefines the meaning of cute!  This is not really that game.  Although it is cute.  It involves flowers, but not necessarily hippies as far as I can tell.  It is a platformer, although it’s not scrolling.  It is actually another game from Spell of Play, but it’s completely opposite of T.W.T.P.B.  The one, the only….BLOOOOOOOOM!  The totally awesome game about picking flowers…or not.  Okay, okay, I’m not actually picking on Bloom and this is not going to be a negative review.  I just meant the or not part if you didn’t really like picking flowers, or if you aren’t a girl.  Most girls like picking flowers, so you may think it’s awesome if you’re a girl.  Bloom is your typical platform-jumper-collect-things-get-to-the-exit game.  However it’s quite interesting.  It’s fun (if somewhat frustrating, but more on that later), it’s nice looking, almost-retro-quality-but-not-quite.  The music is calming as well as the sounds.  It makes me think of the original Ray-man a bit (in the sound department).  Would I buy it (if I could) ?  You betcha.  Actually I’m quite liking the few spell of play games I’ve already played.  Maybe we’ll see more reviews of them in the future.  Anyways if you want to know more, please read after watching this video of the game in action.

You can read more here.  Please I need all the eyes I can get, read the whole thing!

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Haha! Awesome!  Didn’t think you’d fall for the “Please sir, I want some more!”  I mean, that whole please I need eyes and stuff thing.  But you did and now you have to read FOR ALL ETERNITY! mauahauahaha!!!  Actually I’m just kidding.  You really started reading down here so you could hear more about why I liked the game. 

Well let’s start with the graphics.  As you can see from the video, they’re simple (we like simple, we LOVE simple here at Indie Flux, but you already knew that), have that almost retro quality, but with enough detail to look nice on our higher resolution screens (granted there is some filtering on really high resolution screens and you could probably switch to windowed mode with alt-enter and make it crisp but really really small).  The character animations have few frames but really that’s all that is needed.  In short it won’t tax your computer but still looks nice.

Okay now sound and music.  Okay hmm cute as the graphics, well, adequate is more like it.  It’s not going to win any awards for sound or music, but at least it’s not annoying.  And now we have interface.  Now the interface is simple (again we love simple, love it, love it, love it!)  All you do is ‘a’ and ‘d’ to move, and ‘k’ to jump.  And then ‘s’ for switches.  And that’s it.  You have a timer for the trial version (5 minutes per game for the demo).  You have your number of flowers collected at the top. 

Now there’s this one thing I want to mention.  It’s called “Wall Jumping”, this is the frustrated part I”m talking about.  Yep you hit the jump button all the while touching walls to jump.  However it gets annoying if you’re pressing left or right while doing it and as soon as you jump you’re still doing it, the jump sort of screws up.  Unless it’s a long wall, and then you just get height which is good.  But the thing is too sensitive, you can just bounce off walls to your death.  That’s the only problem with this game.  Bouncing to hard.  Maybe if the only wall jumping you could do were at these special wall jumping places, and there were no dangers other than not being able to get all the way up them.  Anyways.  That’s my only problem with the whole deal.

It’s pretty fun once you get around the wall-jumping hurdle… so you should at least try it, maybe you have more dexterity and hand-eye coordination than I do, so then it would be super fun for you (or super easy or both).  Well that’s all I have to say on the matter.

Name: Bloom

Developer: Spell of Play

Price: $14.95 USD

Where you can get it: Here!

Tags: cute, game, game reviews, independent, Indie, Indie Flux, IndieFlux, Platformer, reviews, Spell of Play, Uhfgood

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 12:40 am and is filed under Platformer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.