Petal Runner is going for the cozy vibes, but it sometimes seems more corny than charming

For the second year in a row, I had the chance to check out Petal Runner at Summer Game Fest Play Days. Last year, I praised the game's Game Boy-like visual style and buzzy soundtrack, as the nostalgic charm and 'solarpunk' retro color palette managed to help the game stand out among the sea of demos stationed inside the Play Days headquarters.

Earlier this month during Play Days, I also got a chance to play the new demo alongside Brandon James "BJGpixel" Greer, the studio founder and game's artist. He guided me through a new section later in the game, previously not shown before.

Petal Runner *looks* like classic Pokémon at first glance. You are placed in the shoes of Cali, who travels alongside their HanaPet Kira as you navigate around pixel-art suburban towns and dense cityscapes. Despite being a fox-like creature, Kira speaks and communicates with Cali, which is where Petal Runner resembles other '90s-era creature companion media, such as Digimon. Kira is also housed in a Tamagotchi-like device called a Leash. 

Unlike Pokémon and Digimon, however, there is no training, and there are no fights. HanaPets are mostly just that, pets (although they can speak), and your main job is to deliver new pets to new families. "We're definitely going for the cozy vibes," BJGpixel tells me.

There's clearly been improvement over the last year in many of the visual aspects of the game. The delivery micro-games, which you play several in a row every time you deliver a new HanaPet, are more visually pleasing than they were last year. It also seems there are now a larger variety of them compared to before, along with some slight tweaks to the presentation that make knowing what to do more intuitive at a glance.

The new demo put me in a bigger city this time around, and even though I got lost a few times, it is clear that a lot of effort went into designing the location in the game's retro visual style. Other moments of the demo were also visually impressive - I got to participate in a silly dance sequence on a stage that was filled with creative pixel art and a dense crowd of NPCs.

After two rounds with the game's demo over the past two years, however, I am left with one significant concern — the game's dialogue. I'm not talking about the overall narrative direction or story plotting; the short slice of the game wasn't enough to evaluate the larger writing elements. I'm referring more to the banter between characters, of which there is apparently quite a lot. In my previous preview, I said that 'the dialogue seemed more corny than charming,' but I wanted to be generous to the demo at the time, as I only saw a small part of the game. However, a year later, I found myself with the same feelings here. I found it off-putting, and even felt a tinge of second-hand embarrassment just playing the game.

As an example, there's one moment where a character mentions that they need to move 'lickety-split'. Then another character makes a quip along the lines of 'I'm not licking anything!' This was already groan-worthy, but what compounded the corniness is that the character went back to this exact same quip moments later.

Throughout the various demos, there seem to be quips or random jokes in every other dialogue scene. Maybe I need more time to get accustomed to the game's energy and world. Perhaps I'm just not in the right mindset. I was able to put up with it for the duration of the demo, but it was already wearing me thin during my demo slot. I wonder how much it might wear on me over the longer course of the game.

Despite that primary hang-up, Petal Runner shows promise as a slice-of-life adventure. It is set to release in 2026 for PC (Steam).