Flowstone Saga is a neat indie game I played and I'm gonna review it wow cool wow:
Flowstone Saga is a game that I genuinely don't know how I know about it, but after hearing what this game is it couldn't possibly leave my mind; it is an indie-JRPG, funded via Kickstarter, where the core gameplay is Tetris. How can you not be interested in that??? Good or bad, at least it'll be different, right? Well, kinda.
Flowstone Saga is full of contrasts in a way that's frustrating; the pixel art is gorgeous, but a lot of the portraits, especially for one-off antagonists, look overtly rushed and unpolished. The music is pretty fun, but there's really not much variety to it. The gameplay is great, but there isn't really any depth to the story or a reason to keep playing besides just wanting a new take on Tetris.
I get the impression this is one of those "we don't need to hire a writer, they don't do anything anyways" kinda indie games, and sometimes that's fine, but not when you're trying to make a JRPG with a journal entry for basically every person you ever meet. Looking into the devs a bit via Discord and LinkedIn, it seems their team is only around 10-20 staff, all working part-time, and it definitely shows in the game itself. There's just a real lack of attention or clear direction to the game, and it's frustrating how much feature-creep this has. At the time of writing, I've played about 1.5 hours and think I've seen more or less everything this game has to offer, which is a little disheartening, especially when you consider just how many different things there are in this game.
For example, this Tetris-JRPG also has a town-building and decorating mechanic. In concept, it's cool! I love RPGs with a dedicated home base where you get to see it grow! Here, though, all of the town-building amounts to 'play through the main story and go talk to some guy and then a new building shows up', which feels unfulfilling. The decorating is even worse; you can buy decor from the shop and place props anywhere in the town, but in some areas props seem to glitch out (why can I not put a sofa in my own character's living room??? If it's because the space needs to be clear for the sake of cutscenes, then like, don't let me put it down rather than making it invisible lol) and needing to pause the game, open your inventory, scroll to the bottom, then scroll through a list of every prop, place it, and then repeat that process if you have something else you want to place, it is just too tedious! The reward for decorating? Well, now there's a bush here, I guess. Awesome.
Frankly, there's no reason I care about the town, so why would I want to add more barriers and make traversing the town more cumbersome? Nobody has anything interesting to say and all else you can do is go talk to somebody until a new building pops up and you can leave town to go play more Tetris, so why would I ever linger? Why would I care about how my house looks when it's actively a chore just to walk to it, let alone traverse two loading screens to access the barren upstairs area?
The lack of incentive for anything truly is this game's biggest flaw. The story opens with a very vague chase scene that had me interested, like, that's intriguing! Who is this girl? Why is she being chased? What's the deal? I'm intrigued!!! Then, we get a flashback three months earlier of our character discovering some special artifact a la Horizon Zero Dawn, so okay cool, we're gonna get mild sci-fi mixed with nature, that's always fun! But then it just kinda becomes the most boring fantasy setting possible, with deeply forgettable townspeople (a few whom I suspect were kickstarter rewards based on how out-of-place they appear), the sci-fi basically disappears, and then you just play a weird version of Tetris a bunch. Occasionally townspeople will go 'wow! That's cool! That power sure is useful! I hope nothing bad ever comes of it! We're just a quiet, peaceful village, nobody needs to care about us!' Like, okay guys, it's not really foreshadowing when I literally already saw that something bad would come of it! Give me a genuine reason to care about how we get from here to there!
My mind wanders to something like Xenoblade Chronicles which very effectively uses the "big exciting flashback into peaceful village" opener, and can't help but compare why that works and why this doesn't. For one, Xenoblade's opening is dripping in intrigue! What are these robots called Mechon? What is that glow-y sword called a Monado? Did that guy just die??? Wow, this sure is tense! In Flowstone, it's like 5 bumbling goons chasing as our protagonist slowly jogs away, and they want some kinda power she has I guess??? Then, in Xenoblade, we get filled to the brim with character building, we're introduced properly to our protagonist and his friend, and they're kinda losers, they get told to grab bullets from a cave which is subtly builds tension, before our plot truly begins in earnest. In Flowstone, our hero goes to a forest, another forest, another forest, and sails to an island with scary lizards, and also there's like pirates or something, but we don't need to worry about that right now. Whereas Xenoblade lures you into a false sense of security, Flowstone attempts to lure you into a false sense of alarm, and it just does not work.
I can't fully put into words just how boring every single character is. I like our main protagonist Mirai just fine - she has some cute flavor dialogue, though only a small amount - but man, I hate the hack writer trope of 'this character needs one personality trait and we'll just wrap everything back around to that one trait,' and this game uses that trope for every single character in the game. For example: Mirai is an amnesiac who's been living in this village for one year and acquired some rare ancient power that the village elder seemingly knows about, so why does this girl only seem to be passionate about eating cheese? I use a question mark because even this aspect of her personality seems to appear and disappear at random, as though the writer only remembers her wacky trait anytime they've written a completely dull dialogue and need to add some flavor. As a result of this lack of inquisitiveness from our protagonist, a lot of those interesting plot hooks just don't hook. If she doesn't care and nobody else cares, then why should I care?
With a main protagonist this underdeveloped, I don't even need to try describing how dull the rest of the cast feel as well.
The pixel art is often as generic as the rest of this world, but man, it is so pretty! The shading on every tree is just gorgeous, the monsters are so cute and detailed, and the visual effects that kick in during combat are invigorating! (I know that isn't part of the pixel art per-say, but idc!!!)
I do wish the level of effort put into the dialogue portraits was more evenly spread. With every NPC in the game getting a portrait, it becomes trivial to differentiate which new character is a member of the main cast and which we can hastily forget about. Even some of the villagers are just flat, and at times you'll see a character randomly in a different art style. It just does not reflect well seeing that shoddy approach side-by-side with the gorgeous portraits of characters like Mirai or Vivian! I think making non-important NPCs portrait-less is just a better call than the approach they took here; Shout-out to Stardew Valley.
So, okay, clearly most of the RPG aspect of this game isn't good. The gameplay is by far the saving grace of this game.
The approach is 'Tetris, but a little different.' At first, the non-Tetris-shaped pieces threw me off and annoyed me, but I actually think this was a great idea. I have played so much Tetris in my life, and working with weird, irregular shapes forced me to adapt and think differently. Along with that, the gameplay really tries to keep you on your toes with how you play the game at any given time. In combat, sometimes you'll drop what you are doing to clear a line ASAP, preemptively cutting off an enemy's attack. Other times you'll have pieces thrown onto your board unexpectedly, or be given weirdly-shaped pieces to work with; it's a genuinely really refreshing way to play a game I know so deeply!
There's a semi-mandatory side game where you're just racing against a timer, with many pieces being thrown on top of what you've laid down and often ruining whatever you were setting up. At first this annoyed me, but again, this isn't Tetris, it needs to be played differently. This caused me to focus much more on speed and the versatility of my board, prioritizing keeping gaps small and operable rather than trying to set up a huge combo, and I came to actually love this mode more than the main gameplay.
There's one other side game that asks you to use a pre-chosen set of pieces to make particular shapes on the board, and I found this to be the perfect contrast to the rest of the gameplay. Although, every puzzle I've encountered so far is pretty easy, and I can't see the difficulty scaling enough to really be a challenge. Still, it's nice to have this slower approach where you have to stop and think about where you place things for a minute.
The core gameplay truly amounts to: 'play an unfamiliar version of Tetris as fast as you possibly can'. Though, a lot of the gameplay mechanics seem counterintuitive to this goal. For one, the game tries to incentivize a thoughtful approach by rewarding large combos during combat. There's also a heat gauge that can be filled by strategically placing certain pieces next to one another, and there are special effect tiles thrown onto your board that the game incentivizes you to clear as soon as possible. I think this was all intended to raise the potential skill ceiling, and I guess in theory it does, but so often these mechanics just do not matter. You can fill your heat gauge just by clearing lines and if you play with any decent level of speed you'll pretty much always be at max. The special effect is randomly applied to any tile on your board and often doesn't significantly change the situation of the fight to be worth prioritizing over just clearing lines quickly. And, again, the threat is mostly just a constantly ticking timer, so trying to set up huge combos usually isn't worth the time it takes to set those up.
The game also gives a bevy of abilities to use during combat. There's a flask, which acts primarily as your mid-combat heal, turning one of your placed tiles into one that provides beneficial effects when cleared. So far I literally haven't used the flask even once and haven't had any trouble with any fights. You also get to bring two magic abilities into combat which draw from a mana meter, which is refilled by clearing lines. The first two magic abilities the game gives you is one which just makes your next tile a line piece, and the ability to throw whatever piece you're currently dropping at the enemy, potentially cutting off their attack along with discarding that piece. While this extra opportunity for strategy is not unwelcome, again, the goal is just to clear lines quickly, so more often than not I'm just saving up to use the get-out-of-jail line piece and rinsing and repeating, and since that piece is so advantageous, it actually lowers the skill floor rather than raising the ceiling. Without that ability I have to actually adapt and learn, but why would I bother when I can just set up for a line piece and be A-ok?
There's a lot of potential here. Even with my complaints on the gameplay, it's still an interesting, unfamiliar take on Tetris! And honestly, swapping turn-based combat with a quick game of Tetris functions surprisingly well. But, just like how RPGs can quickly become tedious from spamming the same move in every fight, so too can the Tetris games start blurring together and becoming dull and boring. There is an arbitrary score given after every fight, but they seem to have no purpose in the actual game, nor are there any leaderboards or anything. It's an implication of incentive, without actually providing incentive.
That last statement really sums up my experience with the game so far; there's just so much this game is trying to do, without really developing any of those ideas. It's less a game, and more an implication of one.
Looking at the now-abandoned Kickstarter page seems to tell the story for itself; their development roadmap shows the game as half-finished, and the most recent update, posted September 24, 2024, promises another update coming in just one week. To be clear, Flowstone Saga itself is not abandoned (the last hotfix was released as recently as October 2025) nor is it half-finished from what I've seen so far, but it's clear this was made by a team that couldn't dedicate their full focus towards making the game, and that's simply incongruous with how ambitious the scope of the game is, from the amount of different features to even the artwork itself. There are maybe too many ideas here for a game so small, and the whole experience suffers as a result.
It's so easy to criticize something, to sound utterly scathing and reproachful- almost condescending. Making a game is hard, never mind trying to make an ambitious passion project on a budget of $40,000 over the course of half a decade. It is heart-breaking reading their last major update, posted in June 2025 and announcing a truly impressive number of quality-of-life additions, before lastly addressing the elephant in the room:
"Though the game hasn't sold as well as we had hoped, we're very happy with the reception its received, and we're proud of our 5+ years of work."
They should be proud. It's a truly unique game, unlike anything else I've ever played, and it's made by a handful of people who were absolutely not compensated for the amount of passion and effort they poured into this game.
The game is messy, but so vividly full of love. I'll take that any day over a boring, derivative crowd-pleaser. I hope this game continues getting discovered by videogame archeologists looking to find something special, and maybe one day it can please the crowds that should've been there all along.