Potata: Fairy Flower never blossoms – Review
Poh-tay-tah, poh-tah-tah… No matter how you pronounce Potata: Fairy Flower it’s still a generic bore; a side-scrolling fantasy adventure that barely distinguishes itself from the bargain bin pack. A touch of Celtic fairy charm, a few challenging platforming sections, some genuinely clever usage of items, and smart environmental puzzles are quickly overshadowed by shoddy animation, overly talkative, poorly translated dialogue, combat which feels like an afterthought, dull puzzles, and art design straight out a free iPad app.
When you first boot up Potata you might be duped by the presentation. The sprites are colorful and attractive, the environments cartoonish, clean and sprinkled with spry little details; leaping frogs, trotting pigs, floating fluff topped seeds. The world feels alive. Potata, too, controls about how you would expect. She looks like a blend of Celeste and Disney/Pixar’s Merida from Brave, her mop of red hair flopping as she leaps and climbs.
That stylish facade is immediately shattered as soon as you speak with one of the game’s many NPCs who, in close-up, all look like plump stand-ins for Molly Weasley (Ron’s dowdy, ginger mother in the Harry Potter movies.) Even if you like the throwback art, you’ll soon tire of the nonstop google translate gibberish that litters the meaningless branching dialogue trees.
The game takes place in a fanciful fairy village, with round squat houses surrounded by treacherous forests similar to those in Ori and the Blind Forest. Giant spiked balls, poison spitting plants and aggressive mushroom enemies stand between Potata and the levers, vegetables, and berries she must collect in order to progress in her quest to recover the petals of a mystical flower and return to her home with the ingredients her mother needs to make medicine for her fox (who also inextricably looks like Ron’s mum. Oy!)
Unlike the Ori games or Celeste however, Potata has very few moves in her repertoire and there are no options to upgrade. Players are given a basic jump and, partway through the adventure, acquire a mostly useless wooden sword. That’s it. Potata spends almost the entire adventure leaping across collapsing leaves, pushing boulders, and sometimes paddling in boats. At one point the player can pick a yellow berry that can be thrown in arcs. It has only one purpose – which is almost immediately obvious – and is used in a few simple puzzle type segments afterward. This wouldn’t be worth mentioning if Potata had a single distinguishing play mechanic. For a story about a fairy witch, Potata does very few witchy things.
During the course of the game, Potata will sometimes be hindered by her time-wasting, super chatty fellow witch, Luna who blocks the way or stands outside a puzzle offering hints at a premium. I detest Luna. So I always did the puzzles even if that meant suffering the inanity of classics like, “light up the correct boxes,” or “rearrange the shapes to fit,” and even “connect the pipe!” That’s right, a pipe puzzle. In the year of our lord two thousand and twenty.
Everything about Potata: Fairy Flower works. It’s a mechanically sound game with a story that’s fleshed out and a fantasy world that feels lived in. The problem is that it never feels like they came up with a good reason why it’s a game and not an activity page on the back of a menu at Dennys. You could do worse than spend 4 or 5 hours with Potata and her lumpy friends but that’s 4 or 5 hours you could spend playing something better. It might keep your kid busy for a few hours?
