Connection: Fairy Birthbloom

I didn't know anything about Zorga or this game, but I saw him asking for help to test his game, and I volunteered. As a tester, I was just looking for bugs and problems, but I didn't expect the game to captivate me so much. This is a great game. Let's break it down.

Connection: Fairy Birthbloom tells the story of Fleur, a flower fairy with social anxiety who discovers a birthbloom on her garden. In the world of C:FB, birthblooms are where babies come from. Fleur rarely ever leaves her house, but she's forced to do so because the only way to nurture her birthbloom is with connection energy, which comes from social interactions. Fleur's task is to meet other fairies, connect with them so she can grow her own birthbloom. But with connection also comes... connection. Fleur meets different fairies, talk to them, help them, and grow fond of them. Ultimately, one of them will become your romantic pair. But which one is it?

Long story short, you're a shy pregnant woman looking for another mother to your baby.

Gameplay
The game plays as a puzzle, which happens through what's called the connection game. In connection games, you need to prevent bees from touching your flowers. There are three devices you can use to do so: hurt them with a spell, change their movement with a whistle, and block them with rocks. Connecting with each fairy gives you power boosts: higher spell damage, higher spell range, more blocks or more whistles. At the same time, the higher your connection with a fairy, the tougher the puzzles are.
I found the connection game to be very fun, entertaining and balanced, and an interesting twist to normal dating sims. The puzzle feels somewhat disconnected to the overall story and the concept of connection itself, but I didn't really mind. As a puzzle-lover, this is a game I would play just because of the puzzles, and it made me want to play a bigger game based on this system, with more puzzles etc. I quite liked it.

Writing
A big part of the game is talking to the fairies with whom you're trying to connect. They're all very flirtatious. As your connection level progresses, flirting goes from subtle to explicit. This transition is smooth and clever, and the dialogs are really well written. All fairies are very likable, have their own distinct personalities, and bring out different parts of the protagonist's own personality. You actually get to care about each of the game's characters, which is quite an achievement.

Graphics
The game is all custom graphics, which is something I admire. Characters are hand-drawn, pretty and quite sexy in their poses. Charsets and tilesets are cute and ok. But the mapping... oh the mapping. That's gotta be the game's greatest flaw. There are three problems with this game's maps. First, it's ugly. For a cute game about fairies and love, you'd expect cute maps, but they're not. Second, they're sometimes glitchy, as you can see in the image below. Tiles don't fuse well together, and it makes the game look rushed at moments. Third, they're hard to navigate. Considering the game involves a lot of walking back and forth, I'd want the world to be simple, easy to navigate. But it's got a lot of unnecessary maps and pathways, obstacles, and since a lot of maps look the same, it takes a while to know where you are and where you should go. Even with the same tileset there's a lot of room from improvement with the maps, but my recommendation would be to use panorama maps, since every map is as big as the screen. Panorama maps would give more room to the artistic talents the creator of this game obviously has. They would also give the game more personality and make it more memorable.



Music
There's basically a single tune played throughout the entire game with small variations, and I loved it. There's also another song played during puzzles, and if I'm not mistaken, that's it. Good music, no need for more.

Overall, I love this game. It's short, simple, fun, cute, engaging, and I would recommend it to anyone. The fact that it has so many good qualities makes me think that its one big flaw - mapping - should have been given more attention for a more polished and smooth experience. Still, I'd be really interested in a sequel.