Flower is what happens when a bunch of no-good hippies learn how to utilize the Playstation 3's power.
☆ (out of five)
For years, indie developers have tried to convince themselves -- and, by extension, others -- that conventions are a bad thing; that challenge and complexity -- the cornerstones of any mechanically outstanding video game -- are harmful; that the "experience" -- whatever that's supposed to mean -- is what's important (as if conventions, challenge and complexity aren't what have provided the very best video game experiences, and continue to do so!) Flower is, as I see it, the culmination of this process: a game almost completely free of all those things, and that everyone seems to love. So without further ado, let's take a look.
In Flower, you are the wind. You accelerate by pressing any button except START, which pauses, and control your direction by tilting the Playstation 3 controller. You have one objective: collecting petals. You do this by flying onto flowers, making them bloom. Flowers come in different colours. Activate enough flowers of one colour, and either 1) new flowers of another colour appear, or 2) a new path opens up. The flowers aren't hidden (there are "secret" flowers, but you make them appear simply by collecting enough non-secret petals), and aside from a couple of stationary, easily avoidable obstacles -- that, even if you do bump into them, cannot kill you; they simply destroy the petals you've collected (which really doesn't matter, because they still count; you don't have to go back and re-collect them) -- that only appear on one of the game's six levels, there are no hazards. If Peggle and flOw are casual, Flower is ultra-casual (which is relaxing and pleasant in theory, but dull and tedious in practice) -- there is literally no way of losing, and the only thing required to succeed is a pair of eyes.
Actually, that's not entirely true: you also need a whole lot of patience. The tilt controls are a tad imprecise, so you'll frequently find yourself missing a flower or three, and the rate at which the wind turns makes Leon of Resident Evil 4 seem like the most agile man in the world, making returning to pick them up a huge pain. It's especially annoying in one level, where there's a long path in which the wind -- not your wind, but another -- blows; going against the direction of said wind is practically impossible, so what you have to do if you miss a flower is fly up to a point at which the wind, which moves along the ground, no longer affects you, fly backwards, and then fly back down into the wind to try and collect the missed flower -- and pray to God that the shoddy controls don't let you down again. It's hard to see why the developers couldn't at least have included an option for analogue stick control -- the Sixaxis' imprecision in not exactly a secret, and they must have known that the problems I'm talking about would occur -- or, if they felt that the tilt controls were that integral, that vital a part of the experience, have left out that goddamned wind. It's not like it actually does something -- aside from pissing you off and wasting your time, that is.
For all its failures, there is one area in which Flower undeniably succeeds: it's a beautiful, beautiful game. The lighting is superb, the use of colour better, and the way the grass sways in the wind almost uncannily lifelike. It's possibly the best-looking game the Playstation 3 has ever seen -- were I reviewing it as a technical showpiece, I would have given it a glowing five stars; 10/10; A+. Unfortunately, I'm not. I'm reviewing it as a game, and as a game, Flower is awful. The controls are horrible, the objectives boring (collectathon missions are bad enough when acting as filler in otherwise good games; how anyone could think an entire game based on the concept would work is beyond me) and the level design abysmal. But I guess that's all you can expect when a bunch of no-good hippies who blurt out brain-dead nonsense like "our video game version of a poem" (And keep in mind that they aren't talking about a specific poem. Imagine a comic book artist saying "this is my comic version of a book", or a painter saying "this is my painting version of a movie". They would be laughed at -- and so should these idiots!) learn how to utilize the Playstation 3's power.
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