Reviewed by Cory Satermo

(UCC Host)

Flower for the Playstation 3 is truly a unique experience that separates itself from the standard notion of what people come to expect with video games, and delivers more of an artful presentation.

Gameplay

The premise behind flower is that you control the flow of the wind in a large field of grass. You start off by leading a single petal from a just-bloomed flower, and push it towards other flowers, in which bloom, and release another petal into your wind-stream. As your flow of petals hits each flower, a musical note is played, and depending on the colour of the flower, the chime is different. Strokes from a harp, pings from a xylophone, keys from a piano, all play together harmoniously when swooping from flower to flower.

Once you have bloomed a certain set of flowers, a scene will occur where an area of the field absent of grass and flowers will then bloom full of life. Once these absent patches are all fulfilled, the stage is over.

There is no game over screen, no way to lose, no on-screen instructions or score points. Flower is designed to not feel like a game at all. Instead Flower is more of an entertaining experience, and achieves this for the most part. It is not till the end when Flower begins to feel more like a video game.

Even the controls are not what one would come to expect. Flower takes advantage of the Playstation 3’s ‘Six-Axis’ controller, where the built-in accelerometers are used to tilt and twist the controller much a like plane’s flight stick, manipulating the direction of the stream of wind. You only have to push one traditional button to speed up the flow of the wind. The control layout works perfectly with flower. You never feel like you have to wrestle with it, or twist and turn it like a maniac. It just works, though when caught in a strong current, it can get a bit chaotic.

Graphics and Sound

One of the first things you’ll notice is that this game is gorgeous, especially in high definition. The visuals really add to the experience. Every blade of grass is rendered independently and sways in the wind, as it should. The environments are fully rich in vivid colour, and your stream of petals flows in the wind is like an extension of a painter’s brush.

The sound and music are just as important to the game’s artfulness. Calm and peaceful music, similar to something one would hear when meditating, plays in the background. In later stages, as the wind current becomes more violent, the music adjusts accordantly.  The beats chimed after hitting each flower coincides with the background music to give a complete musical theme; each stage sounds different.

Presentation

As mentioned before, Flower is not your traditional video game; presentation is key. The usual dialogue and tutorial one expects in the opening segments are absent, and player is left only with a simply diagram displaying the controller and arrows of gestures on how to manipulate it. This means that the player is force to deduct how to play the game for him or herself.  There’s no explanation to what you are supposed to do, or why you’re doing it as just about everything in this game is up for interpretation. Therefore one should expect an initially disjointed experience.

But once you’re in the environment for several minutes, and figure out the game’s purpose, that disjointedness is replaced with a sense of feeling open and free. You’re in control of the flow of the wind, and rarely in a game do you feel such Zen. The whole experience is made to make one at peace, as if one is apart of nature. There are no signs of life, no animals or insects, no human interaction (at least at first), just one gigantic field of grass and flowers.

It is not till the final stages does this experience degrade into a more traditional video game.

Before each stage begins, there are a few short scenes showing an urban city bursting with activity. These scenes don’t make any sense at first, and only when coming to the game’s finale that it does, in which the moral meaning behind the experience changes towards a more interpretive message on today’s society.

Without ruining what that message is, the final stages acts out more as an objective, punishing you for making mistakes. Gone is the feeling of just going with the flow of the wind, and instead the stage becomes more of a tactical game of manipulating the current without losing all your petals. This is where the game falls apart. But the game’s shifting plot twist will leave the player so empowered that one has to finish to restore that initial sense of nature.

Final thoughts…

The later stage’s plot twist puts everything into perspective, and rarely does a game have an underlining meaning. It won’t take you too long to finish, but anyone with a love for art and presentation should definitely try this game. Shortcomings aside, the game really nails what it’s set out to be. Flower is simplistic and peaceful; A treat from a medium that is so often set in artificial challenges and mindless gameplay.

Rating

A-