Meadowland Reviews

You move the mouse cursor around and if you hold the button down the fairy flies toward it. You can make some cute effects happen by flying through things like grass and flowers. Sometimes barely visible puzzle pieces are laying around the place and you can fly over them to pick them up and add them to the puzzle. Day and night slowly cycle continuously. There's some stuff to look at, like the two people that live on islands in the sky. There's a picture book to look at as well. The big question is: What the heck am I supposed to be doing here? There's no real goal or purpose. It's just a fairy on a small map with things happening. See the background to the logo at the top of the page? That's the whole map. The fairy is roughly the size of the star on the far left side. (That may actually be the fairy, since that's the starting point.) Also, the visual effect during daytime makes my eyes lose focus to an extent that is physically uncomfortable. I had to look away from the screen several times.

I... Don't know what this is trying to be. It's like a walking sim, but there's no walking. Instead, you just click on a specific spot at specific times, that's it besides waiting for random items to spawn.

Meadowland purports to be a relaxing journey through an "interactive poem," but I did not find it relaxing or interesting. The gameplay was a bit clunky, the sound effects were repetitive, and the graphics were just OK. It had a nice ambiance some of the time, particularly with the aurora, but any given scene (or cutscene) quickly wore itself out. Though the game took about an hour of my time, I probably only enjoyed about 5-10 minutes of playing. The story itself, presumably the main selling point, wasn't very captivating. It was either way too common and trite, or else it was way too obtuse, and I have no idea which is more accurate. I got the impression it never ended up actually saying anything at all. Mostly it was a lot of empty pleasantries that sound deeper than they actually were. Many of the goals or achievements were hard to pinpoint exactly where I should be singing, and they often involved a lot of waiting around for the time to change. Or else letting my attention wander a bit too much and getting stuck on the opposite side of the map from where I needed to be at the time I needed to be there. The worst offense I think this game commits is that it makes you sit in this world for a (relatively) long amount of time, but puts very little in it worth looking at. It's currently on sale for 80% off (for a total of $0.79), but I still don't think I would recommend it for anyone. 3/10

There is not much to enjoy in this art-game: Pros - Nice graphics - good music and sound effects (with one exception) - Night/day cycle that looks very good - Interesting changes you can make to the scenario Cons - Gameplay is very limited and slow - Not many things to interact - No real story, which is told without worlds (just a sequence of events) - Short and not very memorable Considering the time spent on this game, I believe you could use it better with more interesting games, considering the huge amount of games on Steam (or even elsewhere).

Very simplistic puzzle game with uninspired graphics. For what it offers it should be free. I've seen free (non-F2p) games which offer more than that. There's basically just ambient sounds and not much else. The UI isn't friendly to use either. If you want a good game with fairies, I recommend you Child of Light. It isn't in the same price class admittedly but it's way better than this excuse of a game.

I do believe Meadowland was Marten Jonsson's (Star Sky, Star Sky2, But to Paint the Universe) first Steam game. As a walking simulator (though the player flies) the ambition I feel was to tell a simple visual story with the added elements of a puzzle game. As a puzzle game the visual clues found in the book are a bit difficult to understand but the story is "age-old" of when a boy and a girl meet and fall in love. Biggest review complaint is about an achievement called "Tree of Dreams". To gain this achievement the player must fly back and forth across the whole landscape (day and night) looking for semi-translucent puzzle pieces, a type of mini-game. A bit tedious but doable. No offense intended to Mr. Jonsson but I am glad he steered away from actual puzzle elements in his later games. His later endeavors are still beautiful art pieces but focus more on the tale being told then gimmicky puzzles. (Since I own all of this developer's work I do feel I have a little right to comment on an artist's growth in a difficult medium.) The artwork is very pretty and the music soothing. If one enjoys this artist's work Meadowland is must for the collection.

TL;DR: Meadowland is an "artsy" exploration game with interesting but ultimately shallow game mechanics that rides with its dreamy expression. Placed inside a dream, you are a faerie who can fly around and sing in the serene, mystical dreamland. What's going on? Game shows you and immediately gets to the action of finding out yourself. User interface is minimal, only telling you how to move and how to sing. As there are no special maneuvers to attempt, the controls are sufficient for flying around: the faerie goes where you click and hold and then sings when you click the faerie. Singing is the main thing you want to do all the time. Singing at right places (and times) induces special events like e.g. rain or flower blooming. There's also a story that only progresses when you sing at the right place at the right time. Flow of time is seen in the celestial motion but all events nevertheless happen exactly at same times each day or night. Unfortunately "the song" gets old pretty fast. It is this echoing sigh sound and spamming it doesn't make it any better. On the other hand the music is nice enough not to be annoying but too forgettable to leave a lasting memory. In addition to moving and singing you are only introduced to a huge book, the grimoire. It acts as both the menu (telling you e.g. that F is for fullscreen) and as the clue for progressing the story. You can read the whole (short) story at one time and then just come and refresh your memory when you are stuck and bored of exploring the world. Your job is to accomplish the story as depicted by the mysterious tome. Story is hard to explain without spoiling it, so at simplest it could be described as a love story. Your experience may vary as it can be interpreted as a tale of companionship or longing. All the same, it only takes about an hour to figure out the story to its end while looking for the other secrets. That is, if it works correctly for you: on my second try of playthrough I was unable to trigger the story events for whatever reason. While not necessarily partial to the story itself, the secrets are the hidden things to try and find while exploring the dreamworld, many of them worth an achievement. In addition to its namesake, the meadows, you can find ponds, trees, a mountain, a floating island and a sea as well as a couple of celestial and atmospheric features. It's fun to see what you can do and find the various secrets of the dreamland, that is, until you have found the few there are. There's also a mysterious puzzle that took an additional hour of my platime, because I missed it in the first playthrough. These transparent pieces are floating in the air and disappear quickly if not grabbed immediately. For me looking for the puzzle pieces was a chore because they are difficult to notice and they appear only at random times. This being my second playthrough, the progression bug prevented me from experiencing the story for another go so I was even more bored just trying to stumble upon the pieces. Meadowland is a beautiful but short exploration game. It managed to evoke both happy and sad thoughts in me at the end in its presentation of the fleeting nature of dreams. While it's short and gets boring after a while if you can't figure out the way to progress, it's fortunately also very cheap: I'd recommend waiting for at least -50% sale and my recommendation of the game is partly based on the small price. After all, you'll probably get only 1-2 hours content of various quality out of it, less if you are not going for 100% completion.

This was a very nice, relaxing game. There isn't really a lot to it on the surface. You basically fly around as a butterfly or something (who everybody is referring to as Navi lol) singing little butterfly songs and essentially unlocking stuff. Your song helps to create events which further the progress along. The story itself is a minimalist as can be. Basically it is really the representation of a short poem/musing about the limitless possibilities of dreams. You probably wont get that during the game itself necessarily, but the message will be conveyed to you in the end. Overall, not a bad hour long game, but there is also definitely not much in the way of replay value. Presently, the game is a buck on Steam. That seems to be the right price in my estimation. But it for a buck and enjoy. Spend more and you will likely regret your purchase a little bit. All told, for what is basically concept art/poetry in game form, I give this a straight 6 out of 10. Worth your time, pleasant, but ultimately a one and done.

It is a pretty game, but it could be prettier. You have to complete tasks (click on your fairy at the right place during the right time of day or night), and was mostly spent waiting for the time of day to change so I could click on the fairy. This wouldn't be so bad if it was more beautiful. It's also not the kind of thing I'm going to go back and play, as one play-through was more than enough. Also, upon completing the game I felt it wasn't very rewarding, and nothing really happened.

[i]Meadowland[/i] is the first game of Mårten Jonsson, and more of an art form rather than a game if you ask me. It bears no complexity in gameplay and only serves for an hour's diversion, yet it presents a naively beautiful display of an age old story. As the dawn breaks, our gaze meets with a sleepy valley under the summer sun. There is a pond, a meadow, a bridge hanging between two huts, an old archway and a cliff by the sea... and a storybook residing just above the valley. The utter presence of ultimate peace. And here, out of nowhere, we come in to this pastoral scenery. As many gamers call it to be "Navi" - a reference to the fairy companion of Link from [i]The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time[/i] - we take the role of a tiny glowing fairy. As we move our cursor around the environment, the fairy moves around and explores this limited geography, and when we click on it, it sings. Our aim here is to take clues from the storybook scenes and make the fairy sing in the appropriate place, time and condition to make the story progress. For every scene from the storybook we successfully manage to imitate, we observe the next chapter of the tale. These tiny puzzles are not hard to figure out and their results are exceedingly beautiful in a minimalistic way. The environment has its automatic day/night cycle, and the time of the day is directly a piece of the puzzle so you end up waiting for the appropriate time to trigger the event most of the time. There are some other little puzzles that would change this dreamy geography unrelated to story chapters, but they are all details of the end result. The most annoying side puzzle - which reveals the actual ending whence you manage to complete - is finding the half transparent pieces of a photograph concerning the main story around. These pieces appear randomly around the map in different times and stay around only for a couple of seconds, so if you'd like to see the ending event and grab the related achievement, you keep wandering around to catch those annoying pieces. Even with events with slightly annoying triggers, the whole game doesn't take more than an hour - an hour and a half at max - to complete. There is no actual narrative in game, yet there is a poetic narration about the possibilities imagination may hold power over at the end. Ultimately, it is a simple and elegant display with a naive message, open to interpretation by anyone who'd spare that hour. The current price is an exaggeration for the content you'll be getting but the game goes into sale often or even may be acquired via some bundles. For a dollar or so, I can safely recommend the experience as a meditative choice before going to sleep; putting a silent, comfortable smile on your face. I haven't played the developers newer games here around Steam, but I'm told [i]Star Sky[/i] also holds great promise and may very well be worthy to check. Please also check out Lady Storyteller's Curator page [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/ladystoryteller#curation]here[/url] - follow for regular updates on reviews for other games!