Fly Away - A Quick Look At Butterfly

If you're not familiar with it, I highly recommend checking out the monthly article The Arcade.  It is thanks to this article that I've discovered a number of rather interesting freeware games, including the subject of this article, Butterfly.

At it's heart Butterfly is a matching gaming.  However, instead of swapping individual items like most Bejeweled clones do, Butterfly takes the Chuzzle approach to matching.  You actually move the rows and columns until you match 3 or more items of the same color together.  And, just like Chuzzle, any pieces of the same color that are touching will go away, so things don't have to be perfectly lined up.  There's also another interesting mechanic to Butterfly - you can actually press the stylus around the borders and rotate the whole board!  I'm not sure the benefit of that yet, but it's kind of neat.

I did run into some issues with the board rotation, specifically because I was actually trying to move the outer rows or columns, not rotate the board.  Also, there were times where it seemed like the row or column would continue to move for a bit after I released the stylus, almost like it had a momentum going.  I'm not sure if that was supposed to happen or not, but it often meant losing because I didn't get the match I thought I was making and my time ran out.  Yes, the game is timed, and while a successful match resets the timer, the countdown begins again as soon as the timer is reset.  The timer is not very long, either, which means you really need to anticipate your next move.

The graphics are decent enough.  The floating head on the menu seems a bit out of place.  The butterflies are encased in balls and look pretty good.  What is neat, however, is that when you make matches, the balls disappear and the butterflies fly away.  Of course, the timer prevents you from really enjoying this exodus, but it is still a cool idea.  There is no music to speak of, but the sound effects when you make a match are neat.  It actually reminds me of the sound ornaments might make if you were to clank them together.  Maybe it's just because of the holday season, but that just struck me as a really cool sound effect to use.

Butterfly certainly doesn't break any ground, but it's fun and addictive.  It's also pretty light on storage requirements, and the best part is that it is free!  To grab a copy, head on over here.