This review contains spoilers
"The sun and rain keep flowers alive." - Edo Macalister
This game is so tedious I had to restart three different times because I would just dread picking the game up again until weeks later and forget what I played. Eventually I said fuck it and just played with the gamefaqs guide just to get through the story. Maybe I'm just a dumbass but some of these puzzles, especially the Lost & Found puzzles, were just impossible to solve organically. To be fair, I am also really bad at solving puzzles and have a general distaste for maths in general.
The game is also paced really slowly especially in the first half. It took me a while to actually invest into the plot because of how nonsensical and surreal it all seemed. And it didn't help that moving around in this game feels so slow with how you are unable to full stride in all areas in the game, the map being kind of big, going to a new screen takes 5 seconds (going up and down 5 stories of the hotel gets old fast), and the sprint option being locked behind the step counter.
The plot starts to become interesting though when the connections to The Silver Case/ Kill the Past starts trickling through. However by that time I was so over the puzzle solving and walking around that it was hard for me to sit down and fully enjoy some of the lore drops. Half the cast also starts feeling meaningless by that point as well such as the wrestlers who never show up in the story again. I get that we were experiencing the random Sumio clones' memories but it really did feel like the only things that mattered happened in the last 5 chapters.
Despite all of the shortcomings of this game though, I am glad I played it. The dialogue is at its funniest when it was being meta and actually made me laugh at loud sometimes. The music did an excellent job providing atmosphere (I also just really like Debussy). And the opening and intro movies are probably one of the best pieces of visual media I have experienced in my life. My favorite part of the game is the guidebook with how real it made the resort feel with it's about 50 pages of fake lore. As soon as I had access to it, I spent a good solid hour reading through the whole thing and I loved every minute of it. They had a whole indigenous tribe mythos which was truly captivating and really gave that sense of "paradise" like being somewhere such as Hawaii would evoke. Another standout page in the guidebook is the one with alcoholic drinks on it. Made me want to print out that whole page just to make all the drinks which I will probably do in the near future. I would totally stay in a resort like Flower, Sun, and Rain and I'm mad that it isn't a real place.
The quote from Edo I used in the beginning of this review sums up how I feel about this game. It has its ups (sun) and downs (rain) but at the end of it all the game was truly a unique experience (flower) that I feel like would stick with me. That quote is my favorite piece of the dialogue in the game and it really made me meditate on my own experiences. Imperfect game but the imperfect can be considered perfect by virtue of its imperfection. I can say for certain that I enjoyed my stay in the Flower, Sun, and Rain hotel on Lospass Island.
This game is so tedious I had to restart three different times because I would just dread picking the game up again until weeks later and forget what I played. Eventually I said fuck it and just played with the gamefaqs guide just to get through the story. Maybe I'm just a dumbass but some of these puzzles, especially the Lost & Found puzzles, were just impossible to solve organically. To be fair, I am also really bad at solving puzzles and have a general distaste for maths in general.
The game is also paced really slowly especially in the first half. It took me a while to actually invest into the plot because of how nonsensical and surreal it all seemed. And it didn't help that moving around in this game feels so slow with how you are unable to full stride in all areas in the game, the map being kind of big, going to a new screen takes 5 seconds (going up and down 5 stories of the hotel gets old fast), and the sprint option being locked behind the step counter.
The plot starts to become interesting though when the connections to The Silver Case/ Kill the Past starts trickling through. However by that time I was so over the puzzle solving and walking around that it was hard for me to sit down and fully enjoy some of the lore drops. Half the cast also starts feeling meaningless by that point as well such as the wrestlers who never show up in the story again. I get that we were experiencing the random Sumio clones' memories but it really did feel like the only things that mattered happened in the last 5 chapters.
Despite all of the shortcomings of this game though, I am glad I played it. The dialogue is at its funniest when it was being meta and actually made me laugh at loud sometimes. The music did an excellent job providing atmosphere (I also just really like Debussy). And the opening and intro movies are probably one of the best pieces of visual media I have experienced in my life. My favorite part of the game is the guidebook with how real it made the resort feel with it's about 50 pages of fake lore. As soon as I had access to it, I spent a good solid hour reading through the whole thing and I loved every minute of it. They had a whole indigenous tribe mythos which was truly captivating and really gave that sense of "paradise" like being somewhere such as Hawaii would evoke. Another standout page in the guidebook is the one with alcoholic drinks on it. Made me want to print out that whole page just to make all the drinks which I will probably do in the near future. I would totally stay in a resort like Flower, Sun, and Rain and I'm mad that it isn't a real place.
The quote from Edo I used in the beginning of this review sums up how I feel about this game. It has its ups (sun) and downs (rain) but at the end of it all the game was truly a unique experience (flower) that I feel like would stick with me. That quote is my favorite piece of the dialogue in the game and it really made me meditate on my own experiences. Imperfect game but the imperfect can be considered perfect by virtue of its imperfection. I can say for certain that I enjoyed my stay in the Flower, Sun, and Rain hotel on Lospass Island.