FLOW Reviews

MY ASS GOT THE BAD ENDING

Best indie horror game ever. i sh1t my pants

You honestly get what you pay for with this game. What's there to complain about? Here's what you get: https://youtu.be/ZXYkq3DcUBA.

I hope this game is some kind of joke,cuz it lasts only 5 minutes and after you complete it the game crashes automatically

I played through this game three times (two bad ending runs, and one good ending), and to be honest, it feels more like a tech demo than an actual finished product. Despite its very cheap price (less than a dollar through the Halloween sale), chances are you're going to be left feeling like there wasn't enough content. This review is going to be long and WILL contain spoilers, so be cautious if you're wary of either. Right away, I found out that the resolution options don't appear to work. You can turn fullscreen on and off (which is nice, even though the actual window size doesn't really change), but the resolution options don't do anything. I thought it would put my window into a box...? I suspect it might be internal resolution, but that seems strange to me when most of the art is pixel art to begin with. It may be a bug. When the game starts, you're presented with a week-long schedule, and text that goes alongside it, which reads "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE / YOU ARE IN THE ZONE / WELCOME TO [day]." I wasn't sure if it was an intended effect or not, but the first line might be cut off? Is it supposed to be like this? Speaking of the days, too, you're only offered two in-game days, while not only does the steam description mention you have "one week" to figure out what's going on, but the newest trailer also advertises seven playable days. It looks like there was sneakily added text in the Steam blurb stating it's an extremely short game, but I've had my eyes on this title for some time now and I am CONFIDENT it was not there before. Honestly, it's disappointing. Keep this in mind if you are looking to purchase this title. The gameplay is pretty standard for the most part. You run around places and grab things! Normally, I can get behind that! However, the maps are very linear and boringly designed, littered with dead ends that are juuuust too far to see, so you end up going down them pretty often. This gets annoying pretty fast because the maps are also unusually large, and there's no run button, so backtracking and getting the bears are a pain. The bears in Monday's laboratory don't work at all, by the way. There's I think three of them, and I can only walk through them. Considering that they work fine in the next major locale, it's strange and probably also a bug. There don't even seem to be 20 bears total, either. I found probably 10 (including the nonfunctional three). Are/were they supposed to have any significance besides the one that flashes an image of Flo and his dad? There's also a battle at the beginning of the game, but it has absolutely no relevance to anything else that happens. It's part of the reason I think this game is more like a tech demo. The art quality is very different to the rest of the game and it doesn't look like it was polished at all. I do quite like the layout of it, but it's still very primitive in nature and could have used some cleanup. Finally, I wanted to tackle the story, but there's too much going on in my head to put into words properly, and it would add a good five or so paragraphs to this with everything else. To put it simply, the story isn't exactly comprehensive, and you're left with pieces of different narratives that don't exactly add up at the end. Those who may be upset or triggered by deadnaming should be cautious, as "Flo" is Flo's chosen name, and not only is he implied to be made fun of for this name, but his legal/old name is also mentioned near the end, and if you get the bad ending, he is visibly distraught by that name in the notebook before killing himself. Interestingly, if you get the good ending, he seems to be perfectly fine with it, and the ending sequence refers to him with that name. Overall, the game frankly does not feel like a finished product. I can absolutely respect the effort put into making a game, let alone in Unity (I couldn't do anything with it if I tried), but there's a lot of improvement that needs to be done. If this was intended as a proof of concept, then good work! However, with the current state it's in, I can only hope that it will receive updates to fix these things in the future.

Even at 0.99 cents, This game isn't worth it. It's only around 30 minutes long, and it has no coherent plot. Here's pretty much a summary of what it is: so take Omori, Yume Nikki, And Earthbound/Mother with a scrapped pokemon-like battle system. Combine all of them together. Now imagine what that would look like if it was created by someone who didn't put effort into their game. That's what this is. A waste of money, and a waste of time. It isn't ""Story Rich"" and it isn't scary. The only reason that I would recommend playing this game would be if you would want to torture yourself. The game is also buggy, and I don't know if the crash at the end was supposed to be intended, or if it wasn't supposed to be intended. There is also elements in this game that could cause seizures (for epileptic people) and there isn't any warning about them. There's also dead naming (which isn't cool at all???) and ofc there's edgy s***ide stuff. The art also looks pretty similar. The main sprite for the protagonist look's like it was traced from Yume Nikki, and not to mention that the enemy designs aren't the most creative. There also isn't a save system, and I'm pretty sure that most of the furniture sprites are just free assets or stolen sprites. I'd like to end this on this note: For the love of god, just spend that $1 on an actually decent game. Or spend it on a candy bar or just anything else. It really isn't worth it.