Gardening Is Rarely This Random And Brutal
Plants last about a week in our house. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an evil tribe of Borrowers in our house, running away and chuckling after they poisoned a monstera. It has absolutely nothing to do with any neglect on our part. Nothing at all.
Black Flower is a little too familiar for comfort, in that sense. It crossbreeds the normally serene and forgiving gardening genre with the sensibility of a Dark Souls. The default state for any plant in Black Flower is dead, or teetering ever so close to death. It’s the cruellest possible mod for Stardew Valley that you could imagine.
Half Gardening Sim, Half Puzzle Game
But while Black Flower is brutal, it’s also simple. You are given a 3×3 grid of plots in which you plant some seeds. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to press ‘end day’ and pick a weather event to pass over your little farm. That weather event might seem innocuous – a harmless sun, rain or storm – but they bring multitudes: pests, animals, storms, droughts. If you have the same number of plants and seeds from before pressing the ‘end day’ button, then you’ve done very well indeed. The more common result is that one or more plants have gone AWOL.
The weather you choose is important, because the plants have a life cycle. A seed needs three lots of water (from rains or storms) to become a blossoming flower, at which point it needs two doses of sunlight (and a random bee to pass over) before it releases its seeds. Then the flower decays for another couple of days, leaving you with a blank plot to work with. And so the circle of life continues.
That cycle is true if everything goes perfectly, of course. Seeds get eaten by ravens on sunny days, while frogs relish the rain and stomp on anything that’s bigger than a seed. Storms bring hale (blocks of ice that squash almost anything) and hurricanes that tear through a row of your grid. Oh, and moles will turn up willy-nilly, destroying any plant on its square.
You’ll Learn To Hate Frogs, Moles And Ravens
If it seems hopeless, you at least have countermeasures. Initially, they’re consumables bought in a shop with cash. Worms for ravens, carrots for moles, flies for frogs. But Black Flower is a feat-based game, in that you can unlock more countermeasures if you tick off some of the game’s achievements. A good way of playing Black Flower is to scan these achievements and look to complete one or two per run, then you will be set up for the next one.
Secateurs can cut flowers that are used for a different, more tech-flavoured currency. A lightning rod can be purchased to power batteries, and these batteries can be swapped into refrigerators that make ice (useful for progressing life cycles on sunny days) or mole repellents. Scarecrows dismiss crows, while beehives guarantee a bee passing over your flowers to pollinate it. In the late game, you will find that most of your plots are covered with these stations, and very few plots actually have plants inside.
And beyond all this, you have the titular black flower. You start each run with at least one black seed, and they’re a right bugger. You need eight consecutive days of rain to grow them, which makes them the highest of high maintenance. A badly timed mole or frog will obliterate them, and the ‘end of day’ will chuck sunny day after sunny day at you, so you need to have virtually every station in play. And even then you need to cross your fingers. But a grown black flower is needed for the biggest achievements, progression to further chapters, and some passive boosts too.
A Growing Dislike For This Gardening Sim
I find Black Flower simultaneously clever and not my thing. I’ve got an admiration for it, but little affection, and I have to drag myself to the laptop to play it on occasion.
The admiration comes from Black Flower being unlike anything I’ve played. Gardening games are almost always forgiving to the point of coziness, so to play one that is outright malicious is interesting. I almost always felt like I was on the brink, that a single silly decision – or moment of bad luck – would be the difference in a run. I’d run low on seeds and not have enough to pick some of the more desirable weather patterns (rain, for example, costs you a couple of seeds at the very least).
Black Flower also presents as incredibly simple – to the point where I wondered where my third or fourth hour of play would come from – but then opens up like a blossom. You need to learn that the game’s achievements are the ladder that you’re meant to climb, and the end goal is the black seed. From there, more ladders appear. I’m not sure I’ve played many, if any, games that use their achievements to drive the progression forward, and it works well.
There’s also a satisfying sense that your farm/garden is starting to click. I’d start by dropping down a lightning rod as soon as possible, so that I could power various protection items, and then slowly move from six flowers at a time to three. ‘Slow and steady’ wins this particular race, and then the black flower comes into play.
Fertile Ground For Some Randomness
What I don’t like is how dominant randomness is. I don’t have a particular problem with RNG playing a central role in a game, but in Black Flower it plays a role in too many mechanics for my tastes. The weather, the pests, the choices in shops, the number of seeds from a flower, the arrival of bees: they are all a dice roll. Your countermeasures are often random too. And the weightings are almost always against you, as things like sunshine are more predominant than rain.
The result is often like I’m strapped to a boat in a storm, hoping that I make it out the other side. Black flower seeds in particular feel at the whims of randomness, as one single sunny day will kill them. It’s relatively easy to build a garden that can protect the seed for one sunny day, but if you are given three sunny day options afterwards, then an entire run can be lost. It’s possible to unlock further black flower seeds, but getting to that point is laborious, so you may as well reset and start again.
In terms of challenge, Black Flower is basically a set of steps going upwards. You will occasionally unlock tech and benefits that make climbing a step possible. But then the next step rears up, and every time you try to climb it, you’re kicked down by RNG. With persistence, planning and a LOT of luck, you might climb it and so on.
Gardening That Is A Matter Of Taste
It wasn’t a pattern of play that I enjoyed. But I could see min-maxers and percentage-players really analysing the best garden layouts and carefully selecting the right weather for each day. They will be patient players, waiting in-game months before committing to a black flower. That was a commitment that I couldn’t build the enthusiasm to engage in.
If you’ve sneered at Stardew Valley’s coziness and wished that it beat you up more often, then Black Flower has been grown just for you. It demands patience, thought and a willingness to dally with the whims of RNG. I wasn’t that person, but I’m objective enough to know that those people exist, and Black Flower should prove a feisty opponent for them.
Important Links
Grow, Adapt And Survive In Black Flower – https://www.thexboxhub.com/grow-adapt-and-survive-in-black-flower/
Buy from Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/4576740/Black_Flower/
