Hello, humans and aliens!
Welcome to Dandelion, a very short game made with RPG Maker 2003 made by Smokingspoon, the author of a little great zombie game that I reviewed in 2019, Dead Again. It was one of my first reviews and it was pretty awful, while the game was instead really good even if a bit short.
Uhm

Well today's game is even shorter! Dandelion is a little 7 minutes game, linear and with just one ending (unlike Dead Again that was instead made some time before), it can be considered a simple walking simulator or visual novel abaout an alien (also featured in one of the secret endings of Dead Again).
Our little unnamed extraterrestial creature is a sort of scout that's visiting various planets looking for lifeforms. In this game our alter ego will capture and analyze three lifeforms and since I'm familiar with all three, I wonder if the planet explored by the alies is Earth, anyway I'm not going to give more informations about the story or I'll spoil the remaining five minutes of the game.

The gameplay is really basic: go around, interact and talk, there is no inventory, no items, no battles, no puzzles... well nothing, not even choices, except four simple maps and few dialogues. The music is made by Isao Tomita, and it's really peculiar but evocative asd fits the atmosphere perfectly, moreover thare are some "voice" sounds made for the companions of the alien.


Nuuuuuu, poor little cow!

Graphics are instead all custom made by the developer: assets are all stylized, there are 2-3 facesets that probably are the most complex sprites you'll see, and the game uses a palette of two colors: black and orange. This "bare bones" appearance gives a sort of "old game" vibe, reminding of those old classic Spectrum game that often were monocromatic. Despite the simplicity there is some attention to the details in some animations and animated cutscenes, that are about the alien spaceship: scouting a planet, capturing a new lifeform or travelling through space. Very simple, but very nice and competently done too!

Final Verdict
I really cannot say a lot about this game since it's pretty short and I was unsure to post a review, anyway since some years passed and no one has talked about it, I decided to write something: this game is cute and looks like an animated short movie, it's both serious and humorous, in the sense that despite some funny parts it clearly shows a planet on the verge of destruction, where lifeforms are almost all extinct.