Potata: Fairy Flower Review
Fast Facts
Potata: Fairy Flower
Developer: OverGamez
Publisher: OverGamez
Website: http://www.overgamez.com/games/potata/
Genre: Platformer, Adventure
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Age Rating: PEGI 3
Release Date: 06/06/2020
Price: £10.99
A code was provided for review purposes.
Potato, Potata
What intrigued me to pick up Potata: Fairy Flower to review was the magical forest setting and the art style; I love anything fantastical in a natural but mysterious environment. It looked sweet and pretty, and I’m always down to play a platformer!
However, there is an underlying darkness when a curious yet clumsy Potata, a novice witch, angers a fairy by scattering the petals of her favourite flower. As dark forest spirits take over the village, it is up to you to save it.
But was my love of the visuals enough to keep me hooked?
Spiders, Spikes and Spores
Your goal is to save your forest and your friends. In an adventure that takes you across swamps, waterfalls and caves as you aim to find all the lost petals. Strangely though, I didn’t find my first petal until a couple of hours into the game, and by that point, I had completely forgotten that’s what the story of the game was. This is particularly affected by being able to view your quests, which didn’t mention the overarching quest but small ones almost irrelevant to this main plot.
Of course, a lot of them were things you had to do in order to unlock a new area to find a petal. For example, exchanging a vegetable with someone who would give you a seed, growing a plant you could hop onto to reach a high platform. But as mentioned, the main story had vanished from my memory when the first few hours of the game revolved around fighting bosses and speaking to lots of different people.
Speaking of the gameplay, I did enjoy the level of challenge it provided. The main stages weren’t too different from your average platformer; jump over spikes, avoid enemies such as hairy spiders and dodge exploding spores. You had three hearts, but jumping into a spiky ball or into piranha-infested waters would kill you instantly, taking you to your last save point! Formidable, but made you extra careful when traversing stinky swamps.
The bosses were then a little harder, particularly with your three lifelines, causing me to die a couple of times before realising the pattern of the boss and how to survive it. But what really got me stumped sometimes, were the puzzles.
A Real Chin-Scratcher
Throughout the game, your path would be blocked by tall stones, and solving a puzzle would break them. Some were tricky, like the Tetris-like stones you had to arrange to form an image. Then some were imaginative, like the coloured levers which had to be pulled to different heights, signified by corresponding flowers further back in the level. And then, there were the green square puzzles.
The aim of these puzzles was to have all the squares with dots in them highlighted in green, without any red on the board. You would have to click and unclick the squares to see what they did, for example lighting up the squares around it red or green. It’s hard to explain without doing it yourself. But what I can explain, is that these puzzles increased my game time as I desperately clicked and hoped I could eventually do it! It was hard to remember which square did what and finding an order to it. The most infuriating thing was managing to highlight the dots with only one red square on the board.
There are probably many out there who would find this easy, but with a more creative brain than a problem-solving one, I found it hard. I would often have to put down the game, unable to progress, and try again later with a fresh mind. Though, the relief when I finally did it was unmatched!
Balancing Gameplay and Story
I enjoyed how each boss was different and there were a variety of puzzles to prevent it being samey, which is a trap some platformers fall in to. Even though the levels themselves had similar elements, you would often get introduced to something new in them too.
However, my problem with the game was that there was no linearity to it. Platformers don’t have to be linear, but to me, Potata Fairy Flower would have benefitted from it. As mentioned, you would have to do different tasks for people before you reached new places, and I didn’t find my first petal after hours of just making my way through levels. There wasn’t a map or clear indication of where to go sometimes, as the quest page would be quite vague. This led me to go back and forth to areas and people, to work out what I was meant to be doing.
I would have preferred to go through each area one after the other with specific tasks, so I could get a better grasp of the goal in sight. Also, there would be quite a few characters in one area sometimes that I’d forget who was who and if I was meant to be doing anything for them. There were also many typos and grammatical errors with awkwardly phrased sentences, possibly due to being translated into English. This distracted me, breaking the immersion and affected the characterisation. I obviously didn’t expect to have a fully-fledged piece of story-writing, but it did detach me from the characters which was a shame because I really like the character designs.
If You Go Down to the Woods Today…
The hand-painted aesthetic of the background design was soft and pleasing on the eye, the earthy and natural colour palette contrasting well with the poisonous greens and oranges of the enemies and obstacles, enhancing their danger. The character designs, particularly the illustrations in the cut scenes and dialogue boxes, were bold and colourful with exaggerated features. They had the set up for brash personalities, but it didn’t come through enough in the writing for me.
I also loved that there was a background, mid-ground and foreground design, almost expanding the world and making it 3D. Unfortunately, this soon becomes an issue in some levels; the objects in the foreground such as rocks could block certain parts, so when I was trying to jump on opening and closing flowers across insta-killing water, I could not see what I was doing. Thankfully this didn’t occur enough to make the game unplayable though!
Nevertheless, I thought the visuals matched the magical yet dark vibes of the setting well. This was backed up by Celtic-sounding tracks and tense, mystical tunes. I was greatly reminded of Disney’s Brave, probably due to Potata’s bright red curly hair too!
Clean Up the Mess You Created!
I did have a lot of fun with Potata, the variety of elements in the game making me want to continue playing and keeping things fresh. However, the lack of direction was an issue for me alongside some forgettable characters. Regardless, this is a solid platformer with a great look and lots of gameplay time, so is worth picking up if you’re not too bothered about story and just want some fun.
Rapid Reviews Rating
You can purchase Potata: Fairy Flower for Nintendo Switch at the following link: Nintendo eShop
