Last updated on January 24th, 2026 at 08:50 am
Flutter: Butterfly Sanctuary – Casual Game Review
Flutter: Butterfly Sanctuary is a Casual/Simulation/Education game from Runaway Play Ltd, first launched in 21st February 2013.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 4,321+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Flutter: Butterfly Sanctuary Stand Out
Watch your rainforest sanctuary come to life as you collect, nurture, and learn about hundreds of real butterfly species.
Nurture each species through their incredible life cycle, feeding to help them grow from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. Watch your Flutterpedia come alive with fascinating facts about each butterfly you collect. Behold their stunning wing patterns and playful quirks as they flutter around your rainforest sanctuary.
Each butterfly is beautifully illustrated and based on real species from around the world. Discover new species, expand your collection, and create a thriving, magical rainforest.
Features
- Collect 400+ Butterflies: Discover real species from around the world, each beautifully illustrated with vibrant colors and unique wing patterns.
- Nurture Each Species: Feed and grow butterflies through their amazing life cycle, from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.
- Expand and Decorate Your Forest: Expand your sanctuary and adorn it with plants and magical décor to help you progress.
- Missions and Events: Missions, updates, and limited-time events bring exciting new butterflies, decor, and rewards. There is always something new to discover!
- Relaxing Gameplay: Unwind with peaceful rainforest ambiance and a calming soundtrack.
Made with love by Runaway, the award-winning studio behind some of the world’s most beloved nature games.
Please note: This game is free-to-play but does include in-app purchases. For support or suggestions, contact: [email protected].
This Casual game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Flutter: Butterfly Sanctuary is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 7th January 2026
Recent improvements include:
Meet the Forest Spirit Guardian, and join this new Winter themed Limited Time event!
- Enjoy new Narrative, new characters and new Rewards!
- Catch Forest Spirits to earn special limited time rewards!
- Rewards include new butterfly species and decorations for your forest.
- Score 300 required.
Download & Availability
Flutter: Butterfly Sanctuary is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Flutter: Butterfly Sanctuary on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We love this game we love butter flies and this helps our anxiety we definitely recommend this to anxious kids or even adults.
This is like a mix between Merge Dragons and Picket Frogs. We love it! Micro-purchases can add up. Not needed, but.
Love love love the music! And the ambience (we just set those two to play & it is so relaxing, wish we could download it. Anyway, we played this game awhile back & hesitated to download it again due to we remember it being hard to advance at a certain point or something but its obvious there have been some updates since then! Which is great! We think we remember repeat butterflys often (honestly its a foggy memory, as we previoisly stated its been awhile). But that doesnt happen at all! Everything is so gorgeous, so cute! This is a perfect wind down game. We do kinda wish there were more ways to collect flutter bucks. And that there a wee bit more reason to fly your butterflies around while you wait to be able to fuse them, or Like the pollen flowers/flower petals came more often or something else. Im still early in the game tho, so if its there later than we take it back.
Im on an iPhone 15 and it keeps flashing black and freezing but we have to reopen the game can someone help.
We cannot review on our phone so we reviewed on Ipad. There is a floofy borb who loves emoji cat heat and r34 and vore inflation and Daisys Destruction and she is a Spawnist. She is not the kingfisher and she has slow unskippable r34 sussy tutorials and she age plays with the floofy shell tuwtle. We would like to watch TD and FBD (Tuwtles Destruction and Floofy Borbs Destruction) and also we already know how to play Starlight and Flutter. Can you add an option to skip the sussy tutowial.
Been playing both Flutter and Starlight off and on since we were in middle school! Loved these games and how the progression system runs, as well as the continued events! Can also very solidly point at these two games being the source of our entomology obsession <3.
This is a great game, Ive had it for years! And Ive restarted it a couple of times. Its suck a cute relaxing game to play. And we love reading all the butterflies info and pictures Ive collected and breed.
This game was our childhood omg Ive played it so much<33 we hope the developers have a jolly Christmas in 25th of December.
We like the game but using the Matching Story ad to save 30 minutes results in having to restart our iPad. Its the only ad that causes freezing problems and if it doesnt get fixed Ill have to delete the game.
Ive been reading some reviews and we see that the reason given for the new version of the game is that it was built on a new engine. We ran this by our game dev spouse and he says he doesnt buy it. There is no reason why a different engine would lock you into particular game mechanics. A game engine that forces you to give special powers to decorations rather than to butterflies? Seriously? That is a pretty specific game engine. Are you not using Unity? We can imagine there are technical reasons various things are difficult but this feels deceptive, and strengthens our impression that the real reason for the change was to make the game more profitable. This doesnt feel good to long-time users and supporters. Ive waited a long time to write a review, trying to give the new version some time. We have loved this and other Runaway games for years, so we want to be fair, but we are still having a rough time with this new version of the game. There are two things we badly wish could change, and we find it hard to believe they cant be changed. Please, please bring back the speedy butterflies. It is too hard now and too time-consuming to catch flurries of Flutterbucks. Its stopped being fun and has become a chore. Also, we badly wish the game would stop making itself the king of our phones sound every time we open it. We cant imagine that there are many users who want their music or their podcast or their audiobook to stop playing every time they open this game. The old version didnt do this. If this could stop, we would be very grateful. We still love this game, and we will still keep playing Runaway games. They are better than the other games! They are soothing and sweet and beautiful. But Ive sunk a lot of money into these game for many years, and again, its hard not to keep coming to the conclusion that the main reason for the change is that you want more. Unsurprisingly, this doesnt feel good. We are done paying money or watching ads until some of these changes are made. Thanks for reading.
We have this game and Honey Grove, both are awesome games. The instructions are thorough, the art style is amazing. It is scientific (by scientific, we mean it gives you the name the creature is based off of or what it is.) while being appealing at the same time. We truly do love this game. Please do keep making these games! Lots of love,.
The good stuff: The artwork of both the butterflies and the decorations is gorgeous. Though we don't like the switch of abilities to the decorations, we appreciate that their ability cooldowns continue in storage in a way that the butterflies' didn't. Having the event butterflies show up in set order was another good switch. The new prizes from gifting friends are also very nice. The could-be-betters: we've spent between $15 and $20 over the past year (on the introductory deals and on the glowbug subscriptions and we play everyday. However, there are several things that badly affect our continuing to play. 1) Though we play several times everyday, we are never able to finish the events, sometimes not even making it to the second butterfly (the second prize out of the three) due to the events being so short and based on showing up every 2 hours. It is very demoralizing, especially for those of us who've finished the core collections and have no other way of getting new butterflies. If you keep all other aspects the same but give us a full week to complete the events, you'd make us happier and more likely to stay with the game. 2) Also, in the last few weeks, the game is drastically heating up our phone. Either fixing this on your end or giving us a setting option that lessens the effects or graphics to save energy and not heat up our phones would be very helpful. 3) Finally, an option to lock the selling of butterflies (perhaps a switch on each butterfly, if possible) would be great, as another person mentioned. For some reason, there are more safeguards on whether or not you want to store a butterfly than there are on selling them. We've sold hard-won butterflies accidentally in the past while playing when tired, and it is very frustrating. Thanks for reading and considering our (and everyone's) suggestions, and keep up the good work! :-).
Just downloaded the game and theres no sound? We even uninstalled and reinstalled to see if it would fix it but theres still no sound.
We love this game, its so precious. But the amount of money it costs to clear a space is outrageous.
We dont have much to say. We played this when we were younger and deleted it. However, upon replaying it we realized how much we couldve grinded had we not deleted it. We love this game its so cute.
Our experience playing this game has been very relaxing. The game is fun to play in your free time and has so many adorable and beautiful butterflies to collect! We definitely would suggest this to a bug lover.
If you want to relax and enjoy nature and beautiful music then this is the game for you all of runaways games are the best.
This is our favorite game that we are just getting back into and we love learning the names of the butterflies and finding out how to discover them in real life.
Play this game when we were a kid lasted all the time.
We absolutely love the game, but we do have two problems with it, the quests have a a strange way of giving rewards. Some of them seem like they should give better rewards. Our other problem is that the events are waaaay to short. We cant get on every two hours to get harvest and replant our seeds. And we only get around four days to collect all the rewards. But other than that, great game. Love the art, how you get facts, and everything else.
Cool butterflies and tons of mechanics are a nice touch to a collecting game. Two big nitpicks we have is one, the unlocking new area cost it insane. Two, going offline only collects the coins that you wouldve gotten waiting five minutes. Still, a fun relaxing collection game.
We love the game itself. It just becomes a very obvious money grab from sometimes. The cost of expansions is high, the spirit and garden events will give you gifts sometimes that you have to work towards and the gifts dont even relate to the event like an Aztec flower, a frog treat. Its almost a slap in the face. One of the boxes is usually related to the event like fertilizer or a hurry round. Thats great. At least make the gift worth it. Its so hard to complete the events that Ive seen people say they lost joy for the game. Even some of the flowers abilities that you work so hard to reach are laughable. One we worked 4 days for was the ability to hurry a butterfly. Our most powerful butterfly produces 1,400 honeydew every 8 hours. Whats 1,400 honeydew when our expansions cost 90k+ and you worked 4 days for this flower, possibly even spending your flutterbucks on it. The rewards in the book for reaching goals are also horribly low. Use a butterfly to lay 25 eggs gives you 5 flutterbucks for reaching that goal. It takes HUNDREDS of flutterbucks to achieve that goal. And you give us 5 back? Not an incentive. Anyways. We just find the reward system in this game very low. But its pretty and we like the butterflies so we stick it out, refusing to give flutter our actual money because the game is designed for you to fail so theres no point giving them $1 if youre not willing to give them $50. Its not like the things you pay for with real money will make your in game experience that much better anyway.
Flutters really fun! We had it a few years ago and decided to get it again. We didnt really mind having to start over. The butterflies are all really cool, and youre telling us theyre all real? We need to see the blue morpho or common jezebel IRL now. Just a few things we need to point out: – Theres no good way to get more storage expansion materials quickly. We literally just need one more sap to expand it and no way to get it. We mean, we think you can get them from the Video Snail (idk we havent looked) but we dont want to use the video snail. – It gets a bit boring. Our storage is full and our forest is full, so we cant attract any more butterflies until we spend thousands more honeydew to expand our forest, and to get that honeydew we have to log back on after some time (for us its daily) to get it from our butterflies. Literally all we want to do is get our Wood White out of storage so we can fuse it with the one in the forest. – How am we supposed to complete the events??? Im only allowed on for two hours every day but Sunday. Theres literally no way. So here are some possible suggestions for fixing these problems: – Make it possible to buy Storage Expansion materials with honeydew or flutterbucks. – Add an option to swap with butterfly in storage/forest that lets you swap a butterfly in the forest with one in storage. – we dont really have a solution for the event problem soooooo So yeah. TLDR: Great game, just needs some updates.
It was SO much more fun before you took away the abilities from the actual butterflies. We dont know if Ill keep playing.
We would like to ask if it is possible to add a lock function to the existing butterflies in the game to avoid accidentally selling butterflies. We are really worried that we will accidentally sell the butterflies we already have. And the egg laying function is easy to accidentally trigger, we hope to add a confirmation option for all actions that consume expensive tokens.
We've tried to reach out to support about a storage glitch. We tried to open up 3 spaces in our storage and it took our storage expansion supplies without expanding the space. And when we sell a butterfly, it doesn't open up space in the garden. We've been playing this game for about a year, but this new update is terrible.
Im not enjoying the new 4.0 update. Everything looks different, the game loads slower that before and we feel like it is just harder to play the game in general. Can we go back to the old style.
As of 4.0 the game has been ruined for us.First Ill start with the positives,we enjoy the new friend system its quite nice now that we get rewards for gifting.we also enjoy the 4 new core sets aswell.Now on to the negatives everything look weird and almost uncanny even some of the butterflies have different eyes now? Now our biggest gripe is that now we have 3-4 of the same flowers that do the same things.Now when going though our decor menu now we have the last stage unlocked but not the first ones ? This bothers us greatly.And some decorations make us not be able to see our pollen or butterflies because they are that big ! This has up set us Ive been an active player for over 4 years at this point.So in the end we dont mind the update as long as you give butterflies theyre abilities back as this game is about butterflies, not decorations.
Hello as you may know us Im Nivasat3366. The girl who did a five star review. We have downloaded this app onc e again because we accidentally deleted it and this game still is the best it teaches children how to take care of butterflies and other stuff. Thank you for helping people clear their minds.
Netflix has possibly stolen assets from this game.
We love all of the games this company makes.
We love the game it is amazing we love it.
Ill never forget this game in our entire life.
This game is amazing. Ive been playing since we were about 8! It really releases our stress. The music is also so calming. Keep up the good work.
The game is SO cute and fun because when you get the glow we dont know what we are going to get its really cute.MAKE MORE GAMES PLEASE.
Ive had this game for a very long time and Ive gone really far in this game, but we were wanting to know when you guys were gonna open up the forest so we can make new stuff because Ive expanded it as far as it will go it wont let us expand any further Hope to hear back from somebody thank you. Have a great day.
This game is great! It has such colorful cereters! It is so fun and relaxing.Try it out.
We love all the butterflies. We find it amazing that the butterflies are all real species. So much fun this games keeps us from doom scrolling.
We love it and our kid loves it. Some of the ads are a bit scary but shes good about hiding away from it.
This game is so much fun the graphics are so good and the game is great we also love the butterflies, and the other great things about this game you should definitely try it out.
This a really good relaxing game totally worth your time. There are fun events constantly and it's really fun especially when you get a rare species.
We cant believe Ive played this for almost 10 years now, this team is really dedicated, we love the art and the causes they contribute towards. Always relaxing to come back to our butterfly garden.
We just recently found this game again from our old iPad and playing this again made us feel so nostalgic and happy. Great game we really like it :].
Get this game if you like butterflies and want a nice calm and relaxing game to play,Id definitely recommend.
Ive been playing for a week now and absolutely love this game. The music, the colors, the butterflies. We enjoy how there are opportunities to get special items without spending money and the time for waiting isnt tedious because there are multiple different times for different things going on. Im never bored. We enjoy a well done game with good events and have already monetarily supported. Keep up the good work.
This game is freaking amazing we mean the butterflies are so cute and even the caterpillar and everything in this game is beautiful and especially the game being relaxing really got us addicted we love how we move our butterflies around admiring the beauty of the species you did such a good job of making this game :D.
Super calming game we love it and we used to have it when we were little! Its such a vibe to play while listening to alex g.
This game is so amazing we have nothing but compliments to say.
Girl this game is us peace lol, 10/10.
We wish the app creators and tech department would put as much effort in this version that they do in Starlight. It seems like Starlight gets all the attention and yet Flutter Butterfly Sanctuary is the superior game. We like that its a bit slower paced. Its fun and it works perfectly for that ADHD dopamine boost. The thing that bothers us most is the prices & the way you receive futterbucks/dew/ect! Holy cow its like gambling Ive spent close to $20 in two days and we have watched 10 hours of the 5 same commercials That is an entire month* of Netflix. At this rate, we will likely putter out and stop spending, then eventually stop playing Its so fun but so not worth it in this economy. The creators are no doubt making hand over fist at users expense The game is glitchy, there is a lag Not enough to get us to stop playing just makes it bothersome. There is also an ad in the shop that says earn flutter-bucks by watching videos with the snail- but it gives you dewdrops not flutterbucks. So its false advertising on that too.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 4.056
- Size: 543.56 MB
- iOS: 14.1 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, JA, KO, PL, PT, ZH, ES, ZH
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Runaway Play Ltd
Last updated: 7th January 2026 | Genre: Casual, Simulation | Developer: Runaway Play Ltd