Game Review: Enchanted Forest Meditation

Enchanted Forest Meditation is an independently developed meditation game that focuses on creating a space for the player to settle in and relax to music and natural sounds. Downloaded via the Google Play store for Android, this game uses very little controls to manipulate the player's orb. The goal of the game is to collect the small floating notes that help to play the music while being guided through a meditation with the words on screen (these are the faint words in the lower right, fading in and out).

I found the contrast between aiming to collect the musical notes and attempting to be mindful and calm, a really irritating process. Because the sliding controller that moves the orb up and down the screen is slow and unresponsive, possibly purposefully so everything has a slow and gentle pace, but it makes aiming to collect the musical notes difficult. With the aim of the game to be mindful and meditate, it is easy to get caught up and ignore the guided text.

The artstyle appears to be hand painted trees using the parallax scrolling effect to give the sense of depth. This environment has a particularly enchanting feeling that has the potential to settle the mind. However, the HUD and GUI do not work at all with the backdrop. The controller is almost hidden againsts the colour of the trees and the sizes of the musical notes are far too small and not obvious to the eye. This makes reading the text and looking out for the notes all the more difficult.

What I've learnt from this is the use of GUI must be designed to stand out and be clear to the player. Also to bare in mind the purpose of the game and how the design of all the interactions and assets work with that in mind. If something is getting in the way of the experience, it should be given a lot of thought or scrapped completely.