Reaching For Petals PC Review

Reaching For Petals starts without any preamble, putting your character in the middle of a forest, ready to follow the linear road it designed. A few steps in and a narrator begins a philosophy-infused monologue about the forest and how it lived and lasted without any human interference. That is, also, what you’ll be served for most of your time spent in Reaching For Petals’ company. The game uses the Unreal Engine 4 and, save from maybe a little too much light used in its first level, does look good, offering even a few vistas that are downright gorgeous. However, looking closer I found some textures that weren’t as polished as others and varying degrees of pop-in which ranged from barely noticeable to very visible.

There’s high quality both in the voice work behind the narration and in the writing itself, which could easily be pulled from a good book. The narration also explores numerous themes including transience, love and loss. As you move on through the different environments, certain set pieces come into view acting as visual support for what’s being told. Aside from that, however, the world in Reaching For Petals remains relatively passive, making me wish there was more to it. Regardless, the atmosphere is aided by a soundtrack that also complements the narration, remaining soft in the more contemplative moments but also climbing to intense crescendos when it’s required. The slow treks through nature were great, coming off as the more effective way of expressing the ideas the game plans on expressing. While the environments you walk through remain mostly passive to your passing, their presence does harmonize, to some extent, with the narration in order to convey a sense of atmosphere. And that does manages to both engross and touch the person on the other side of the screen.

On the other hand, we have memory sequences which, while retaining some of the writing’s quality, they do more harm than good. By removing the player from nature and placing them into the character’s supposed home, all that happens is a shattering of the atmosphere already built. You can’t interact with objects in the house, except for the one thing that triggers the actual memory sequences. There’s also no way in which the game tries to make you feel at home here, instead, bringing you to a place that feels more foreign than the woods. If this was intended, its desired effect was thoroughly lost on me. These sequences are textual in nature and present significant moments in your character’s past. They generally revolve around finding and maintaining love, however, to me, the writing felt as if it was forced to maintain an overly-positive direction. Potential spoilers may follow, so, consider skipping to the following paragraph if you want to avoid them. My biggest gripe with the memories sequences, aside from the fact that they brusquely pull you out from the nature bits, is with their lack of nuance. Where the narration is well structured and has depth, these rely too much on just presenting a relationship that, for the most part and regardless of the choices made, is painted as ideal. There’s a reason, perhaps, for focusing solely on the positive aspects and it might have to do with making the conclusion more powerful. However, with little done to invest the player in the characters, it all comes off as less-than-genuine.

These memory sequences also give you a handful of choices you can make and to which you can return. The choices themselves change nothing in the overarching story and are subservient to the writing in these sequences which, again, is very straightforward. While it does start from early on in the characters’ lives, these sequences simply tell too little and are too fragmented to instill a sense of familiarity with Kai and Renee, rendering the effort put into them without much effect. When the game descends from the realm of the philosophical into the personal, it does lose a fair share of impact and momentum. This makes the overall effectiveness of the story to be questionable, in the least. I was drawn in by the walking segments and they do attempt to join together with the memories as you get closer to the end, but where these felt natural and varied, the memories felt forced and relying much too heavily on painting an ideal story.

In an attempt to add some gameplay elements, Reaching For Petals tries to make use of a few platforming sequences. In actuality, these are extremely basic, to the point where they don’t affect gameplay much. If it’s not a log or a rock you literally have to run into so that it falls over and creates a bridge, it’s a gap that must be jumped over or rocks that must be climbed. As simple as it is, however, I still detected some collision issues particularly when the game required me to climb. Overall, it doesn’t quite distract from the fact that you are walking for most of the time, feeling quite unnecessary.

You can get through Reaching For Petals in about an hour and a half. It has great writing, narration and a wonderful soundtrack, but it’s dragged down by its handling of character development and its memory sequences that, at least to me, felt strangely impersonal. It didn’t leave me completely impassive to what was going on – it does appeal to sensibility – but, at the same time, it lacks cohesion and isn’t particularly memorable either. Not on the whole, at least.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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