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.”
Contact: Email