Use the mouse. Saving is automatic.

Okay!



But... how do I get that over to...



So how am I meant... but... how do those...



WHAT?!

Continuing the Japanese tradition of humble understatement last seen in Hatoful Boyfriend, this is an independent game called Hanano Puzzle ('Hanano' from the Japanese meaning "how the bastards am I meant to do this one".) I heard of it through the GameFAQs classic games board, where several members have been working their way through its challenges and demented PxTone music.

The idea of the game sounds simple - your only available move is to swap blocks horizontally, blocks will grow a flower in the direction of their arrow when they're next to another flower of the same colour, and your objective is to sprout all the blocks on the screen. In practice, the puzzles are so intricately put together and/or consistently sadistic that each one is a maddening challenge - rather appropriately, it really is about as hard as getting flowers to sprout out of bricks.

The game seems to intentionally go directly against the traditional puzzle progression of introducing a technique to you and then encouraging you to use it - instead, what this does is force you to discover a new technique in order to complete the level in front of you, right from the very start. Level 1 is something that I'd expect to find towards the end of a stretch of levels in most other games - instead of giving you a small demonstrative level to play around in, it drops you right into working out how to use the blocks in secondary ways and the physical effects of growing flowers out of them. But after a couple of these puzzles, it lets you believe you're getting somewhere and you make some fast progress until you run into the next flowery brick wall.

I've had a week or so of on-and-off struggling, and I'm now on level 15. There are fifty of them. This is going to be a long game.



Oh, come on.

Hanano Puzzle