Welcome back to Save State, where we talk about all the cool things regarding random titles that strike my fancy. Have you ever been blindsided by something? I mean, completely caught flat-footed, where you can no longer add your dexterity bonus to armor class? That was me when I stumbled upon a fun game that combines RPG mechanics with Tetris called Flowstone Saga. With its charming and colorful artwork, how could I not be interested in such a fascinating title? Don’t talk about my backlog- it’s just… not worth it.

In Flowstone Saga, you control Mirai, a plucky and adventurous girl who gets into some trouble while exploring a ruin but manages to fight her way out due to finding the power of Tetris. The story is present and actually kind of funny at times too, but you spend basically the first half of it doing nothing but chores for the residents of Mirai’s village until the story actually ramps up due to pirates and the imperial navy invading the island. A lot of this tale is quirkier than it is thought-provoking, as the best moment in the entire game is helping a shark monster and his band catch the attention of Beeyonce, a successful singing bee monster. I don’t think her name was actually literally Beeyonce, that’s actually what I nicknamed my Beedrill in Pokemon, but it’s something close to that effect.

A lot of Flowstone Saga is running around areas, clearing side quests, finding items in chests, solving switch puzzles in the overworld or Tetris puzzles at shrines, and entering enemy encounters. Once you touch an enemy while in the overworld, you’re transported to a screen where you build up your selected dollar store Tetrimino pieces and clear lines to deal damage to enemies. The larger the clear, the more damage you do, though you can clear just one or two lines back-to-back to form combos that deal high damage as well. Flowstone Saga is an interesting union of two basic principles in games that just about everybody should understand but likely no one thought to marry together until now.

Enemies can attack you directly, add pieces to your board, set traps, or even destroy pieces you’ve placed, which means you need to pay attention to what enemies and especially bosses do. Enemies can also use status ailments against you, like paralyzing you so you can’t rotate any pieces for a few seconds. Sometimes the enemies will even add their attacks to your board that have a timer above them, and you need to quickly remove those pieces so they don’t deal damage to you once the timer finishes. It’s really interesting how the enemies also interact with your board play, so it’s not just your Tetris skill being used but also how quickly you can adapt to any nonsense the enemies may throw at you.

On the surface, the idea is insane: creating an RPG Maker game that uses Tetris as the combat system sounds like it’d take forever to clear random battles. Thankfully, there are a bunch of ways you can speed through combat pretty quickly, though what and how much of these power ups you have access to will likely depend on your play style. As you progress through Flowstone Saga, you’ll level up, which allows you to buy and upgrade various perks that can give you an edge in combat, and some perks work best with different tile pieces. You can respec your perks at any time too, which will help with figuring out precisely how you want to approach battling in this.

You can customize what tile pieces you get as you progress through the title too, as you’ll find frog spirits who either have no special abilities but let you completely customize which pieces you receive in battle, or you can choose one who forces you to use specific tile pieces but also may have an ability like combo line clears doing more damage, or that drop dynamite blocks onto the board that explode when they’re involved in a line clear. There’s a lot of customization, and you’ll find gear as you explore which will synergize with different frog and perk setups, so if you find battles taking too long for your liking, trying a different loadout might be all you need to sweep through battles quickly.

If there’s any issue I have with Flowstone Saga, it’s with board visibility. Where your next piece will land is denoted by a blue fiery effect that can be insanely difficult to see when most enemies can catch different parts of your board state on fire to indicate an incoming attack… because they’re both wispy fire effects. You will often not be able to see the top of the board, either, due to notifications from your gear and from enemies that pops up during battles. The faster you play, the more these notifications stack up until they’re covering your screen for multiple seconds at a time (and the longer you take, the more attacks the enemies can do). This means that you need to ensure you’re targeting the correct enemy who is charging up an attack, making sure you’re using the correct power at the correct time, etc., plus the screen clutter of fiery attacks from enemies can make the screen look overly busy when you’re trying to drop pieces as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, you can adjust the fall speed of pieces in the menu or even set it so that the pieces fall in a kind of turn-based mode, allowing you to adjust and fine-tune the challenge to your capabilities. I left the settings at default, but if you find having to play quickly and accurately to be too stressful, it’s nice that the options are there to make the title more accessible for you while you play and clear story and side quests.

Flowstone Saga has solid pixel visuals with great character art portraits during story segments. Nothing is animated, but there are a lot of different portraits for each character to give you a solid idea of the designs of each person participating in the story. The music is good all-around too with the battle theme being quite an energetic bop- which is good, you’ll hear that track a lot. There are a few unique battle themes that you’ll encounter throughout this as well, and all of them are fun to listen to.

All in all, Flowstone Saga is a fun indie adventure that unites two gameplay systems I normally would have thought incompatible. Chaining line clears and performing critical hits so I could literally toss pieces I didn’t want to use at the faces of my enemies was great, and the few puzzles here or there, while easy, break up the pace quite well. If you even remotely enjoy Tetris and like playing the occasional RPG Maker title, Flowstone Saga may be a fun way to spend 15+ hours.

That being said, I think we can safely bring this entry of Save State to a close. Remember to always back up your documents and look both ways before crossing the street. It won’t just be your day you’re ruining if you don’t.

Until next time!