Welcome to our review of Nature Matters, a painting puzzle game with a nice story!
Set off on a puzzle-filled journey to save the planet and experience a compelling tale of friendship, sacrifice, and redemption.
In “Nature Matters” you take on a role of a little plant spirit. Without protection, surrounded by a city that grows up from everywhere, one day she realizes that she is completely alone and won’t be able to survive. The only solution is to find her caretaker – a little boy who has been caught up in a whirlwind of human weakness and convince him to take care of her again. During your journey, you will see different lands devastated by the destructive human influence.
Solving the puzzles, with the sounds of relaxing music, you will have the opportunity to restore vegetation and colors in them. The unique graphic design will allow you to immerse yourself in a world that will remain in your memory for a long time. The “Nature Matters” project is a small contribution that the studio “Digital Melody” wants to make towards arousing social awareness of the threats that result from human neglect of the natural environment. As the creators say, if at least one person becomes more attentive to nature by experiencing this game, it will be a great joy for us.
In Nature Matters, the principle is easy, color all the surface tiles without crossing one a second time. Easy as a principle and the game takes great care to really expand beyond this by introducing warp points and lowering floors to create new openings and so on.
At first, it is a rather easy game with often more than one solution to each puzzle, making it a breeze to get into but once you really progress in the story, it becomes clear that there is just 1 way to solve a puzzle in order to proceed. What it makes up for ingenuity in its design, is sadly a little less promising when it comes down to the controls of the game.
On a console like the Switch, you’d expect the handheld mode to at least support touch controls, but alas, no such thing. Also, the controls are very fickle and janky, to say the least. I often had more than the distance crossed that I wanted, always resulting in a redo of the level. You really have to gently flick the thumbstick for the movements because otherwise, you are not going to be finishing the level.
I do feel this is a bit of a missed chance to be even more amazing than the game already is. I just adore this game, but seriously got annoyed more than once due to the entire level being a bust. Also the lack of touch controls, I can see myself play this game more than once over on mobile just because it is such a blast to play…
In conclusion, Nature Matters is one of the prettier painting games I have seen in a long time and I just adored the entire mechanics of how to really pass a level, if only the gameplay mechanics was the inspiration for the controls as well. I still recommend the game though, it is loads of fun!
