Blue Entropy Studios’ new walking simulator, Reaching for Petals, has just been released and below you can find our video showing its first 15 minutes. In Reaching for Petals, players will travel to the peak of the ever-reaching mountain to uncover the true nature of their mysterious and seemingly unguided journey.
Reaching for Petals tells a really emotional story, however it lacks any gameplay features at all. This is the epitome of walking simulators as the only thing you do in this game is… walk and jump. Not only that, but the game can be easily completed in an hour as it features only four chapters.
Reaching for Petals is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and even though it looks quite good (for an indie title), it suffers from some really annoying issues. The most annoying one is the really low Level of Detail that has been used. As such, everything – from trees to rocks – transform right in front of your eyes. There are also some really awful warping effects on big rocks (due to their low LOD values) and even small objects (like grass shadows or small stones) pop-in when you get close to them. These pop-in issues immediately break the immersion that Reaching for Petals attempts to create. Furthermore, the game does not offer any option to remove the Chromatic Aberraton effects, and we did notice numerous low-resolution textures. Yes, Reaching for Petals is an indie title, however we strongly believe that mere walking simulators should offer mind-blowing visuals in order to at least enjoy them.
Performance also appears to be fishy. Despite the really aggressive LOD system and the lack of dynamic objects, the game’s outdoor environments ran with an average of 70-75fps on our GTX980Ti at 1080p on High settings. For what is being displayed on screen, this seems a bit low.
Reaching for Petals is currently priced at 9,99€ and comes with a 5% discount until September 11th. Fans of this genre will definitely enjoy it, however it fails to win those that are not really interested in this kind of games.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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too much motion blur
so it’s ACTUALLY a walking simulator?!
where’s the content?
Looks great. Definitely picking it up. I loved Firewatch, played through it twice and for many, many months after I remembered the characters’ names, the names of all the locations and desperately wanted to go back. I can’t remember many “games” like that.
And I think it’s a bit insulting and pretentious for self-proclaimed gamers to call titles like these “walking simulators” with a pejorative connotation. Interactive media can and should be more than mindless pew-pew. Computer hardware and the artists and engineers that build software for it are evolving to expand the medium of interactive media. This isn’t 1995 where the hardware limited us to contextless FPSs. I mean, how many reskinned games of ‘tag with bullets’ can you play and consider that the apex definition of interactive art?
I don’t even think of titles like Firewatch and Reaching for Petals as games. They’re just interactive stories AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. Not every piece of computer-based interactive media has to have upgrades, fail states, levels, microtransactions and all the other accouterments associated with “core games”, whatever the hell that means. Just like you can enjoy action movies and documentaries at the same time, you can enjoy experiences like Fallout 4, GTA 5 and Firewatch.
I think it’s dumb that people will see something like this, say it’s “not a VIDEO GAME” therefore they’re precluded from enjoying it. So stupid.
Every time I hear drivel like this it only motivates me to sh*t on walking sims even harder. Interactive media should at least be interactive, by removing all gameplay and claiming that automatically makes your game deep and inherently superior you are taking a dump on the primary, essential thing that separates games from movies. Walking simulators are not just lazy and pretentious, they’re an insult to the medium.
IT’S NOT A GAME, YOU DUNCE. Not everything is a damn game.
Go play Destiny.
An insult is not a game, so I guess you’re right.
Go “experience” moving a camera in a 3D map because the hipsters who made that don’t have enough animation skill to even do proper machinima, let alone “interactive” stories with anything approaching meaningful interaction.
Word!
The pop in is insane… and that’s fixable, seeing as its UE4. So hopefully they can patch it!
So basically someone sat down with the unreal editor and made a level… How cute. Then decided to make a game out of it. It might have worked if the level design was with spectacular detail, but since it’s not, it’s not interesting, looks dull, generic and procedurally flapped together over a weekend.
Here’s how a forest scene should look like in Unreal Engine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwzpIgcZmq8
How I wish it wasn’t a walking sim and the pop in to be fixed as well.