Alien Garden (1982)

Look: 7/10 Matrix-esque title screen ha. The manual, available here, sure does talk up the "beautiful" flowers but uh, compared to the Apple II or arcade graphics at the time, this really ain't all that beautiful heh :-X Well-made character sprite, though.

Play: 7/10 After a bit of struggle getting this to play right, because it was a .rom file, I was glad to get it functioning! Cool concept and all, and glad finally not another space shoot em up or arcade action game, but just isn't interesting enough to keep pushing through. Cool ideas with the different generations of flowers and the unique gameplay, but can't claim to have loved it.

Feel: 7/10 I love concepts like this, I just feel like the Atari 8-bit computers were still too rudimentary to realize such a lofty, abstract concept. I had some fun playing this for 15 minutes or so, but I spent most that time (as is the point of the game) figuring out what each body part did to each generation of flowers. And I started not being able to remember what generation each was. I still have a lot of respect for the game, but it's just okay in reality.

Attachment: 7/10 I love experimental, ambient, and "pointless" modern games, well I like the idea of them I haven't actually played any like that flower game where you just fly around based on the video clips I've watched. But this just, is too rudimentary for experimental concepts to be properly realized. Cool concept, decent execution, largely skippable though.

Addendum: I really should give this another try. After all, this is one of my favorite Epyx games so far. And for how much I love abstract games, why wouldn't I give this a more proper try?! Smh at myself. This perpetual headache aint helping