Petal Crash

Freshly Blossomed Fantasy Action Puzzle!

Developer: Friend & Fairy

Platforms: PC, Switch, PlayStation 4

First Release Date: October 12, 2020

To-do: Replay all the story modes and add more about it!

Petal Crash! Petal is a really fun take on arcade puzzle games by Friend & Fairy, a studio name so good that I'm only a little envious of it. The game is a love letter to the genre while also managing to be completely unique. Imagine those ice block puzzles, the ones where you push a block and it slides away. Basically, Petal Crash is that sort of puzzle turned into a versus puzzler. When two Petals of the same color Crash together they explode and the blocks around them slide and can make further matches. It's very intuitive and has found a very loving audience with competitive puzzle fans, especially with the release of Petal Crash Online. This game lets you set up some truly silly chains, as long as you have space for it on your board, and if you don't let any spawning or garbage blocks get in the way. There's all the modes you'd hope for in the genre, with a funny and sweet story mode for each character, a lot of customization for single player and versus modes, and a head-scratching puzzle mode complete with a full editor.

I want to go into more detail about the story mode here… but I actually haven't played through all of the story modes in quite a while. Each of the characters are very charming and have very distinct voices in the writing. There's Lilibri the fairy of course, there's Strelitz, an angry demon child with the most supportive moms in the world, there's Yosoti the dancer, who is trying to understand the legacy they carry- they're all a good bunch, with some really well done between-round dialogue. Rosalia is probably my favorite character. Hopefully I’ll get to a full replay soon and update this section with some more specifics on each character's story. One thing I absolutely adore about this game is how each character's strategy as CPU players is directly based on their personalities. Ore Kid fills up her board on purpose to dig through the board, and Strelitz nearly button mashes, for example. There's a great write-up about this (and more on the game's development) here.

Connie’s Characters: Petal Crash has a lot of secret characters accessed by holding the color select button (right trigger on Switch) in modes other than story mode.

Libbie- Hold R on Lilibri. A proposed mascot for LibreOffice designed by Tyson Tan.
The Baz- Hold R on Strelitz. Recently, he seems to be showing up in many games!
Penny and Deony separately- Keep cycling through their colors. Why would you do this to them?!
Milla- Hold R on Penny and Deony. From Freedom Planet.
Mimi- Hold R on Ore Kid. Promoted to a regular character in the sequel!
Nova- Hold R on Yosoti. Nova the Squirrel, from the NES homebrew game of the same name.

There's two more secret characters in the spoiler dropdown below. Both can be encountered in story mode under the right circumstances.

I guess that leaves this page a little short for the moment, but I needed to have Petal on here as part of the site launch! It’s a wonderful game with so much love for the genre packed into it. Please look forward to Petal Crash 2!

Thank you for reading!

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