Use Mirrors And Lights To Wake Up The Sleeping Flowers In Light The Flower
Light The Flower ($0.99) by Chillingo Ltd is a clever puzzle game where the goal is to light up indoor houseplants with sunlight from the window using a series of mirrors, filters, prisms, and flashlights.
Each level begins with a room in the house, a plant, a set of mirrors, and a sunlight filled window. You will need to drag mirrors and position them (by rotating with touch gestures) on the screen in order to reflect the light at different angles until you can light up the plants.
Lighting up the plants will often require several mirrors, because there’s usually furniture in the way, and you must direct the light around it. To make things more complicated, there are also stars that must be hit with the light to be gathered, so you will need to split the light in several different ways to finish each level perfectly.
As the game progresses, new elements are introduced, such as filters that change the color of the light and plants that will only accept blue, red, or green light. Eventually, there are prisms, flashlights, and light-activated switches to contend with, so gameplay can be quite a challenge after the first several levels.
Levels are divided up into houses, and the stars that you gather unlock new houses. Unfortunately, levels are locked until you finish the preceding content, so if there’s a particularly difficult puzzle and you want to skip it, you’re out of luck.
Luckily, the graphics are bright, colorful, and super cute, which alleviates some of the frustration of not being able to skip a level. In addition to the lack of level skipping, you’ll also likely be frustrated with the controls during later levels, because the dragging/rotating gestures are not ideal.
Finishing a level requires quite a bit of precision with tiny beams of light, which does not fit well with clunky rotating tools that often knock the mirrors out of position.
Despite the minor control issues, I thought Light The Flower was a lot of fun. My biggest complaint was actually with the achievements - there are only 10 of them, and they’re entirely uninspired. Finishing each house and finishing each house with all of the stars are the only ways to earn achievements.
I’m hoping for some more creative achievements and the fine tuning of the controls in an update, but as it stands, Light The Flower is a visually appealing puzzle game with unique gameplay. Puzzle lovers looking for a challenge will want to go ahead and download the game, which is reasonably priced at $0.99.
One quick warning: This game worked fine on my third generation iPad, but according to reviews, users with older iPads have been having some serious crashing issues. If you’re going to play this on a first generation iPad, you might want to wait for an update.
