Last year, I had a stint where the only game I wanted to play was Art of Fauna. The App Awards-winning mobile game is as simple as they come. It’s a puzzle game where old paintings of animals are split up into strips and you need to reassemble them. It’s a little collection of virtual jigsaw puzzles, but the lovely art, satisfying sound design, and wealth of educational context about each animal had me captivated.
This month, I’m reliving that pleasant moment all over again. Developer Klemens Strasser is back with a quick follow-up called Art of Flora, available now on iOS devices. It’s the same game, but with drawings of plants and flowers instead of animals. What is new, though, is an even stronger emphasis on education that’s making me even more curious about the natural world. It’s the type of gentle, cozy game we could all use right about now, and it even works as a perfect chaser to Pokémon Pokopia‘s environmentalist themes.
Art of Flora gives players over 100 puzzles to complete, with 10 available for free. All the pictures come from real historical drawings of plants made between the 16th and 19th century. They’re gorgeous images that are a delight to reconstruct by dragging strips around and snapping them together.
