Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

This game is remeniscent of the "mastermind" code-breaking board game. But instead of coloured pegs, you have to place the four possible nucleotide letters 'A' 'C' 'T' or 'G' in one of 3 slots. Each slot is a 'gene' that determines certain properties of a flower. Unlike "mastermind" that tells you how many letters you've chosen correctly, for each choice you're presented with a geometric flower that varies in the shape, number and color of the petals and carpels that you have to match with the solution provided at the start.

You get only 6 tries to pick the correct one out of 64 possibilities. The puzzle of the game comes from understanding the relation between genes and the resulting "phenotype". The first gene determines colour, and this one is easy to match. The second gene is called figure, and determines the shape of the petals (square or oval) and the shape of the heart of the flower. The last gene is called size, and detemines the number and size (width) of the petals.

As a former bioinformatician, I love the reference to genetics in this game (Even though genes are really thousands of nucleotides long, and flower genetics works very differently, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_model_of_flower_development)

My main criticism is that the details of the flower, especially the heart of the flower are hard to see. The game runs in a window of a fixed size that only occupies a fraction of my screen, and I often wish I could enlarge the window to zoom in. If you also happen to have non-contrasting colours in your flower solution, then it becomes impossible to see what is going on.

We recognize pleasant background music from the water levels of Mario 64. Overall, a very inventive game mechanic that makes this an interesting puzzle game.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

A nice, enjoyable entry carried by the fun-looking flowers you get to see. It's essentially the usual password guessing game, but instead of the usual feedback of what you got correct, you get to stare at the nice geometric patterns. I liked it.

Graphically, the game looked polished and neat. I always appreciate using the default A4/A5 font.

The sounds were somewhat generic, but I liked the music choice. I set an appropriate mood.

On a technical level, I appreciated the polish for the player input. You could press the bases and the cursor would auto-advance. Also, you could select which aspect of the flower to input, it just felt very nice. The text scroller wasn't super special, but it was more fun than the usual horizontal/vertical scroller. I thought the procedural aspect was well done, there was always something new to experience as far as the flower appearance.

I thought the genre was represented well. The game took advantage of the flowers by varying their colors/shapes etc, and the connection to genetics felt compelling.

The only thing to complain about was that it was a little hard to see the flowers sometimes. It felt impossible to win sometimes, but I didn't feel bad since I got to see some fun flower combinations along the way.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

My highest caption score goes to the genre requirement, for the elaborate and creative procedural generation of flowers. I like the game's idea of discovering/generating flowers through code, and this game tied that requirement directly into the gameplay. Of all the games, this one had the most complex set of rules for flower generation, too, so bonus points for that.

I did have difficulty with 2 things:

- The window size on my display was very small, and as such the buttons and fonts in particular were microscopic and hard to read.
- I had difficulty finding documentation on how to play the game. I searched a.cc, the progress logs, and the readme, but had to figure out the UI by randomly clicking things. Since the fonts were so small, it made it especially difficult to read the difference between G - C.

Apart from that, there was one flower that I could have sworn was matched to the example, but nothing happened, leaving me to believe it was up to me to appreciate the match, or match at the top row, until I matched a flower later and was met with the victory sound.

The sound effects were fun, and added a bit of polish to the game, too.

I give the game a lower score in the "Overall" category for the small text, lack of instructions, and making the game somewhat unplayable without a lot of guessing.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 5