With the advent of cozy, wholesome gaming, I’ve been a bit worried that games might try and be cute but not really do much with it. Flutter Away is a butterfly photography game that sees you camp in a rainforest over the period of five days to study the species. You have a camera and a perch to capture and study the flutter things. It sounds wholesome and it is. I just wished the game did more with the premise.
This review is going start off quite moany. Flutter Away’s main issue is its compact space it takes place in. Over the course of 5 days you unlock three paths to wander down, each taking about 15-20 seconds to walk to the end of. At the end of each path is a small area that may take about 5 seconds to walk around. The camp area is a tent, campfire, clothes line and table but none of it is really interactive. You’ll be asked to walk up and down these same three paths over and over again in search of butterflies, plants, frogs and birds but they open up gradually over the course of the game. This happens via an extremely clumsily controlled log moving action where the movement and the camera are placed on the same analogue stick, disorientating the player. The whole thing feels more like a tech demo for something larger and more involved but I was surprised when the credits came around that I’d seen everything in just over an hour.
The main crux of the game is to take photos of wildlife but the controls and zoom of the camera are stuttery and not very fluid compared to other photography games. It also had a hard time deciding if I’d taken photos of certain species and so I had photos with butterflies in frame but they were not deemed close or clear enough to count. Then in other photos where the animals were more obscure it’d be fine. If there was a larger playing area I could have had fun trying to find all the species but Flutter Away doesn’t allow you that either. Instead it shines bright sunbeams down on anything new that you’ve not taken photos of, removing any investigative skills from the game. The perch allows you to point at butterflies and they’ll land on the perch for you to study them. It shows off the beautifully detailed artwork of the insects but then fiddly controls prevent you from rotating things nicely to view it all.
As you can tell I was getting quite annoyed with Flutter Away at times and that’s because it does some other things really well. A journal fills up with animal facts and photos you’ve taken of them and it feels wholesome and alive – like a school science field trip. You have the option to just chill out and enjoy the rainforest vibe. It had day/night cycles that change when you complete all the main missions for the time period so you aren’t rushed but experience an evolving world. The sound design is quite well done too. The capybara is cute and mischievous – arguably stealing the show from our fluttery friends. These are all great but they’re the ingredients around the main meal of exploration and photography and if neither of those elements feel well implemented or engaging, they can’t carry an entire game.
I’m sure many wholesome and cozy gamers will enjoy Flutter Away. I did to some extent too. It is just not a shining example of what these subgenres can do. If you have to wrestle a game through its all to brief story and feel like you’ve seen and done everything within an hour – for an exploration game – perhaps it isn’t quite selling itself in the best possible way. This is a brief interlude with some science trip vibes – not anything earth shatteringly bold or majestic.
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