Just petals in the wind…
indie games review
I grew up in the city; lived here all my life. It may or may not be related, but I’ve always had dreams of flying. Soaring up, beyond the buildings and into a limitless sky. There’s a certain kind of resonance then, on a personal level, that I have with the dreams of the city-bound potted ones in That Game Company’s Flower.
To back-track, Jenova Chen and fellow developers have had a certain desire for flight in games from their origins. Cloud, their first game, let players take control of a blue-haired fellow dreaming of soaring through the skies to gather up the white fluffy into shapes and weather. While their second game flOw was a more abstract underwater departure, Flower returns again to the skies as you take control of the wind and its paths through the world, collecting petals of the many flowers into a torrent of colored specks through the air.
To say much about the contents of the game itself would be ruining its beautiful experience, so I’ll be as brief as I can in expressing my joy. Perhaps awe would be a better word for it. Just flying through the themed environments alone was enough to bring some amount of lightness to my soul, let alone the over-arching goal being striven toward in its six chapters.
While the game is short — easily beatable within an evening — it is an experiential adventure best taken in all at once such as Portal or Rez. It is perhaps even better compared to a game like ICO where a subtle story is told using as little dialogue as possible… Yet Flower takes it to another level, forgoing even the concept of characters and instead focusing solely on the cause and effect of elements in nature and urbanity.
By the time all had been seen and done, the feeling of what I was actually doing — I will admit — got me a bit emotional. Perhaps it’s the relief it brought from my currently stressful life; a relevant ping in this city kid’s thoughts and dreams; an aesthetically gorgeous synergy between visuals, audio and visceral control. Flower is all of those things.
And yet, it’s also a game. Once awake, secrets and perfecting routes through the soaring playground await and provide an opportunity to experience it many more times. I will be coming back again and again.
