Once in Flowerlake

Once in Flowerlake is a stunning game created by a lone developer. Hats off to Mikhail. The music, atmosphere and artwork is beautiful. Please check out his Artstation profile to view more of his beautiful artwork under the same name. Gorgeous! I enjoy taking a break from more combat driven games and engaging in games like Once in Flowerlake that is not violence driven. Instead its focus is on telling a story and experiencing the world created. As a person who lives in a part of Canada that can experience harsh winters, I knew right away once my old man left his cabin in the game that the developer understood winter, has lived it. You trudge through the knee high snow, not run, but slowly trudge. Just like real life. You can run in spurts (at times) but you get tired fast and you can feel the slog through the snow. And the game does have some haunting mystery to it with a twist ending. It takes about two hours to complete and I found it enjoyable. Your driven to find out the truth ...

Don't waste your time. Too many problems, and aggravations. IMO OK, this wasn't helping. I was angry at the game ( that's smart right?), so I was brief. I think I should explain if I'm going to review it. This is a little game, probably free, I don't recall. Anyway, what is obvious is the game is out of whack in it's brightness scale. The whole game looks bleached and is hard to see in some cases. The same is true at the end where I couldn't see where I was going because it was too dark! Aside from that the bots are overly active, making any sort of exploring difficult if not impossible. Prepare to die multiple times. If/when you do, you will just be sent back to the last save, which can get annoying after a half dozen or more times! C'mon guys, you say explore and then you shoot me when I move! I don't think they've worked on this game for years, so don't expect these problems to be rectified. I gather there are also bugs, but I don't think I had that issue, at least. What is sad is ...

The game plunges us into a world of hopelessness, it would seem that there is no way out, the routine has swallowed us up and will continue this way until the end of our days. But by chance, everything changes dramatically and we have a chance to break out of the vicious circle and be saved.

Once in Flowerlake is a rather boring, unremarkable, monotonous story, telling about a nameless person, mired in a routine in the middle of a cold world and soulless machines.

Pretty atmospheric game with a winter location. Well done graphics, interesting plot, as well as a soundtrack that perfectly suits the style of the game. 10/10

A slow and atmospheric (short) walking sim with a narrative. Despite a few imperfections, I enjoyed it, especially the snow covered surroundings with use of low contrast colors. The ending was a bit abrupt though. Looking forward to seeing more in the future by this developer.

Really cool small game, money not wasted. As soon as i met Kate,i felt strong Matrix vibes, and i was not wrong. Amazing atmosphere, great sound and music. Controlling the movement was really clunky, i wish it was rotated 45' , so that W=up, A=left etc... All in all, amazing tiny game. Good job

Atmospheric, beautiful, very cool for such a small price. It's worth adding a sound setting. The menus, in general, still need to refine.

I recommend it! + awesome winter atmosphere + interesting storyline - i wish the game was a little longer

I loved the idea of this game going into it, and the story was good, but unfortunately the poor level design made it very frustrating. You spend most of your time in the game walking around somewhat aimlessly as you try to figure out what exactly you're supposed to be doing. It wasn't until 20 minutes in that I realized there was a keybind to see your task, and even that was ambiguous at times. On top of that, there were some bugs in the text-system where if you interacted with an item that generated a text prompt while the prompt was already being carried out, the text would stack on top of each other. As far as actual level design, I found myself getting frustrated at the bots, who seem to be all-knowing (even if you hide in the bushes) and telling myself, "I don't want to keep playing". At the final area of the game, I almost quit before seeing the ending because I couldn't figure out how to jump from the higher platform and it was VERY frustrating. TLDR: I hate to leave a bad r...