Dandelion is a charming little visual novel to just pop up out of nowhere and what a lovely little surprise it was. As soon as I saw that it revolved around a Grey and that it had a 1bit aesthetic I knew I had to check it out. What I found was a hard little game to talk about without spoiling it (something the creator was kind enough to point out in his description), atleast narratively, mainly due to the simplicity of its premise but also due to its incredibly short nature. All you really need to know is that the less you know going in the better.

What is easy to talk about without ruining anything however is just how damn polished Dandelion is, based on the screenshots supplied with the project I knew it was going to look nice in action but the quality of the cutscenes really caught me off guard. While there is only a handful of them throughout the short experience each one uses some really fun visual tricks to pull of things like the illusion of depth. They also blend seemlessly with the in game visuals which isnt something I always see handled well withing the RM2K3 engine.

Dandelion also features a soundtrack by Isao Tomita, an artist I wasnt familiar with up until this point but will now have to investigate because his work is apparently very much so my jam and I need to hear more of it. It fits the tone and the visual aesthetic of Dandelion surprissingly well, to the point where much like Space Funeral its hard to imagine the game with a different audioscape. That also leads me to my one issue with Dandelion and it is indeed a very VERY small issue, and thats that the main to NPCs both have their own audio cues that play when you interact with them and the music was just a touch to loud to really hear those sound bits properly.

I dont know what else there is to say about Dandelion, it feels like some long lost European animated short turned into a cute little 10 minute games and really you have no reason not to check it out, then again I might be a little biased since its the hope of stumbling onto little gems like Dandelion that bring me to RPGM.net in the first place... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯