Have you ever looked out your office window at the bustling street below and sighed at the lack of color found on a city street? Have you ever closed your eyes on a rainy day, and pictured a lush, verdant meadow bathed in sunshine? Flower attempts to touch the part of you that longs for a beautiful landscape on a sunny day by putting you in control of the wind in a grass covered field. Your objective is to guide that wind and the flower petals in it from flower to flower in order to open them up, and bring new life to barren and dreary parts of the field.

Flower does an excellent job of stimulating your senses.  The graphics and sound effects found in Flower are fairly simple, but extremely effective. You won’t find the most realistic grass ever seen in a video game, but rather grass that looks like it came straight out of a dream. The color palette in any given level matches the mood of that level perfectly, and the sound effects heard as a new flower opens help to punctuate that mood. Vibrant colors, and subtle sounds come together perfectly to create a unique experience for each part of the game.

Before I go any further, I should stop and point out one unavoidable fact about Flower—it’s not a game, it’s an interactive piece of art. Flower doesn’t set out to make you feel like a winner or a loser, it just sets out to make you feel. There’s no conflict, no struggle, and very few obstacles to overcome. You aren’t punished for completing levels too slowly, and you’re not rewarded for completing them quickly. Flower strives toward one simple goal: to remind you that the world is what you make of it, and beauty can be found anywhere if you’re willing to look for it.

You start the game confronted with a dreary room in a dark colorless city with one small yellow flower on the window sill. As you focus your attention on that lone source of color, you are transported to your inner meadow where you must use the wind to guide flower petals to other unopened flowers in order to open them, and spread color throughout the meadow. As you progress though Flower, you will visit different areas of the meadow, and eventually you’ll make your way to the city.

The gameplay (interactive art play?) is a mixed bag. Most of the time, when a PS3 game implements motion controls, the results are disastrous, however, Flower controls quite well. As you tilt and turn your controller, the wind reacts as you would expect it to, providing a relaxing and enjoyable gameplay experience . While the controls are solid, the level design leaves something to be desired. I often found myself wishing I had more room to just wander around soaking up the green grass and blue sky, but the linear level design of Flower doesn’t really allow for that. You just take the wind from point A to point B opening flowers to unlock the next area, so you can open more flowers.

Flower isn’t for everyone. As I’ve said, it’s a piece of interactive art, not a game, and if you aren’t into that sort of thing, then Flower probably isn’t for you. If, on the other hand, you can look past the straight forward level design, and the lack of challenge found in Flower, and enjoy it for the piece of art that it is, then you should absolutely give it a try.

-Mike Kurz

Tags: Flower, Games as Art, PS3, PSN, review

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