For this week’s critical play, I chose the game Lunar Flowers by NetEase Games, which I played through an iOS app. Lunar Flowers is a relatively short puzzle game in which you have to connect flowers in a specific pattern without lifting your finger from the screen or going over the same line more than once. The pattern is identifiable through different kinds of visual cues on the screen.
One mechanic of the game was finding different ways to implements clues as to how to connect the flowers. As seen in the images, there were sometimes dots to show how to connect the flowers, or purple lanterns that showed what configuration to make, or headstones that added another level of difficulty by breaking apart the configuration into multiple headstones that were mixed in order. The dynamic that this created was one in which the player would know to search for how to pass the level within the screen, but it would change slightly throughout the various levels, adding unfamiliarity that the player would have to conquer in order to pass it. The aesthetic that this created was one of challenge as the player had to work to understand the different visuals and what the task of the particular level is.
This game also clearly used interaction loops. The first interaction loop that I came across was understanding how to connect the flowers. When first exposed to the flowers, I thought you had to just tap them in the right order, but that failed. The lines connecting them were pulsing, so I thought you had to maybe tap them at the right time when the line pulsed over the particular flower, but that failed as well. After way longer than I prefer to admit, I finally understood that I had to draw lines between the flowers without picking up my finger. This function was necessary for the rest of the game.
As a whole, I thought that this game was enjoyable. It is not the most complex of puzzle games, but I felt that it was fairly easy to see and understand the mechanics that the game was utilizing more than I had in past critical plays, which was particularly cool to see from a beginner game designer perspective.
