Flowstone Saga Review (Steam)

by Jim Smale · October 1, 2024

Flowstone Saga Review, Master a totally unique puzzle-battle system in this 16-bit, JRPG-inspired adventure featuring an epic story, charming characters, stunning pixel art, and epic music. Follow a grand story set in the mysterious Ocean’s End islands full of lost memories, ancient ruins, pirates, treasures, and frogs.

Flowstone Saga Review Pros:

Charming pixel art graphics.
Download size.
Steam achievements.
Full controller support.
Game settings – three difficulties, piece fall speed, text speed, battle text speed, and music volumes.
Graphics – resolution and v-sync.
3 save slots.
Fast loading times.
In-game cutscenes and interactions.
Puzzle RPG gameplay.
Tutorial pop-ups as you play.
Big powerful soundtrack.
Heat is where you deal damage and break special blocks. Heat causes you to do more damage for each attack.
Combat is played out as a Tetris game, you place blocks and clear lines to do combo attacks.
To increase the tension and speed Heat will slowly deplete so you need to be quick.
End of battle breakdown and rank.
Red tiles can appear that deal bonus damage when cleared.
Green tiles heal you when cleared. They appear on the board randomly.
You can fight multiple people and the game gives you a button to swap between them.
Clear a line with elemental blocks to deal elemental damage to enemies that could be weak to a particular element.
Enemies can do charge attacks but luckily you see and hear them charging, hitting them before they cast it stops it.
Very addictive.
The enemy can send bad tiles to you, take tiles away, and generally give you grief.
Puzzle Tetris will happen where you need to place tiles in a particular place to clear it and you only have a set of tiles to use.
You can skip cutscenes.
With tiles, you can spin them, hold them, fast drop them, etc.
You see flame outlines of where the tiles are going to drop.
The controls are shown on the pause menu.
Earn exp and every even level you up and increase stats, tiered perks start to unlock.
Unlock journal entries as you play and interact with new characters and locations.
It’s not all Tetris, you have adventure sections where you can freely run around locations and you see enemies, hitting them triggers the fight encounter.
It all plays out in a 2D world.
It does so many good spins in the Tetris-like formula. You can do things like mining in Tetris where the blocks and mechanics are different but still fundamentally Tetris.
The mining has a time-based approach, intermittently they will drop more dirt blocks in, treasure chest blocks that once broken give rewards.
Full inventory management and you can equip items in each hand, a ring, and a bracelet.
You actually unlock new tile pieces to be used in future battles.
Loot chests to find.
The game autosaves regularly and shows you on screen, but you can save and continue and save and quit.
It’s surprisingly easy to get into and it all flows at a pace that you will like.
Every time you level up at odd numbers, you can earn points to upgrade already unlocked perks.
I didn’t gel with the story but I liked that I could quickly skip cutscenes and just do the action.
Within the town, you have your own house and you can fully decorate it.
World map location select.
You can re-visit areas at will.
The game gives you quests and tries to nudge you along but you do get some openness.
Each location has a percentage bar to fill up as you explore and see everything.
Gold can be spent in the shop for consumables, rings, gloves, necklaces, weapons, and decor.
Weapons and gear can add abilities or change your stats.
Great looking locations.

Flowstone Saga Review Cons:

You cannot remap the controls.
Bare minimum graphics settings and you can only change them on boot up.
No voice work.
I found I didn’t really get engaged with the story.
It can feel a bit chaotic at times.
The game is not always great at giving you all the information or where to go within a location.
Judging the time you have to counterattack an enemy attack is not as quick and as accessible information as you would want.

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