Flora Search Aurora

(☞N.B.: in this game you carry/use an inventory. You access it by pressing <Esc> while playing! It is important!)

This game does many things right. Immediately from the start you can see some lovely effects (animations for menus), excellent support for customisation (different keyboard layouts, even two langauges!). It feels like playing some old school adventure game (but with a top-down view, like in some CRPGs of the era) There is lots of (good!) dialogue, which you can skip by pressing <Space> (dialogue baloons are mostly clear, which means you can get which character is taking turn talking).

Characterisation (which is paramount in a story game) is quite good, ASCII art cute and functional and you will immediately recognise the gameworld as yours and explore it! Which leads me to another peculiarity of this game, it is timed! Which add a little bit of bite and challenge to it! The themes are mixed, some joyful, some contemplative (botany), some more serious. Again everything is cooked-up in a proper manner.

I had great pleasure playing this, examining everything, exhausting dialogue choices, seeing all the different facial expression of characters. The only thing I would improve is to clearly indicate controls (inventory too!) from the main menu or in the first scenes of the game!

Explored the various rooms and collected a few items but never figured out what they are used for.

Pros: * Opening cutscene is impressive. * Character emoticons are a nice touch. * The humour is pretty good.

Cons * Controls could be better explained. * A button to skip cutscene/dialogue sequence would be nice. * A better idea of what the aim is could be good.

Besides the bugs that I encountered, which jadedctrl fixed very promptly, this was a fun and polished game |ñ_ñ|
I can tell lots of love has gone into it and it shows in the care put into the graphics, dialogue and story. `o`
The way to draw the characters with tiny faces is cute and conveys emotion well. |*0*|
Some instructions for the controls are needed, especially for the inventory (speaking of which there's a bug which doesn't let you go right until you "lose the item"). ¬_¬
After exploring I thought the goals were clear enough, the only roadblock was that some of the objectives hadn't been implemented yet. |T_T|
I hope the mental state of the characters ridden by depression and insecurities doesn't reflect the one by the developer |;_;|
All an all I think this is a good game and I hope that jadedctrl finishes it, good job! |~.~|