Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King

To say Blossom Tales wears it's Zelda inspiration on its sleeve would be an understatement. If you've ever played Link to the Past or Links Awakening this game will feel right at home for you. Everything from the environments, gameplay, weapons, and music is so similar that it's almost uncomfortable. Saying it outright, this is a good game—but it has no unique style of its own. Apart from the fairy-tale like structure the plot follows; everything is from previous Zeldas. While not automatically a bad thing, gameplay suffers due to its implementation. Puzzles aren't as clever, and you will see similar ideas constantly. Besides the art style, dungeons all feel the same. Even challenges in the open world lack variety between one another. If you liked the block puzzles in Minish Cap don't worry; they are everywhere. For such a short game there are a tone of collectables to find. Exploring

Playing status: 100% achievement, finished the game Grindy Achievement(s): No (those who rush the game might need to grind a bit). Optional Achievement(s): Yes (16 achievements). Difficult Achievement(s): No. Intro Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King is an action-adventure game about a young knight that is trying to save a kingdom from an evil sorcerer. It tries to mimic the old top-down, 2D Zelda mechanics with the sword, unique items that can help you to progress new areas, explorable overworld, dungeons, and other changes that are unique to the game. Pros: - 5 dungeons - Secrets that can only be reached with certain items - Puzzles in some dungeons - A lot of unique items that you can switch around Cons: - The lack of tile-based movement makes it hard to progress without taking damage - Bosses can be cheesed Specs Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Should

What Sonic Mania is to Sonic 3, Blossom Tales is to Link's Awakening. Well, not quite...Blossom never tries to stray from the beaten path, recycling most of the elements in unabashedly similar ways. It isn't a problem that it so closely resembles its inspiration, but rather that it doesn't try to do anything unique. If you don't mind playing a rehash of an old tale, then Lily the Knight's journey will keep you engaged for a little over 10 hours. [Watch a Longplay here] Pros + Great pixel art + Large open world to explore + A variety of weapons and abilities to collect + Silly jokes and puns that will make you smile + A couple of great chiptune tracks + Gives you a few choices that change the tale in cosmetic ways Cons - Repetitive gameplay: Reused puzzles and enemy types - Poor Maps: The World Map is super pixelated, and dungeons lack a map reveal item or compass to find. Backtracking

Solid little classic action-adventure/Zelda-like in retro style by a very small team. Like often, it doesn’t invent anything new, but what it offers is entertaining all in all, can’t say anything against it in that regard. Lots of what you would expect from a title like this, exploration, puzzles, fighting, hidden items or upgrades, villages, NPCs, dungeons, side quests, you name it. Story is simple, yet cute, and unlike some others, I also didn’t mind the a bit childlike approach by telling it via a grandfather’s tale to his grandkids. Just adds a humorous aspect to the narration in my opinion. Music is fitting and not bad as well, but a bit monotonous over the long dungeons/areas. So until here everything is fine. Well, if it weren’t for my feeling that I‘m somehow not completely overwhelmed. It’s actually a bit hard to put your finger exactly on the reasons why, but having it 100%ed