Giant Bomb Video Game News

Flower is a PlayStation Network game from thatgamecompany, the creators of flOw, that Sony first showed off back at E3 earlier this year, though I got my first hands-on time with the game here at the Tokyo Game Show. Beyond its first syllable, Flower shares quite a bit in common with flOw, though in a way, I've never seen anything quite like it.

The game opens on a little flower pot sitting on a window sill where a lone bud is beginning to blossom. As one of the petals falls, the game shifts the perspective to an expansive grassy field, where you're essentially playing as a gust of wind, pushing that lone petal across it. Like flOw, the gameplay in Flower is neither terribly explicit or complicated. Your role seems to essentially be that of a pollinator, collecting petals and using them to blossom like-colored flowers, thus bringing life to dry patches scattered across the landscape. Sure, that's not how pollination actually works, but it's an intuitive, simple system.

The controls for Flower are entirely entirely motion-based, requiring you to tilt the controller side-to-side to turn and up and down to follow the curvature of the game's rolling, grass-carpeted fields. This isn't a game about precision, so the loose motion controls actually feel quite nice, and they reinforce the game's fluid, dreamlike qualities. The sense of motion as the camera rushes across the field is fantastic, and the way the individually rendered blades of grass bend out of your way, as well as the fluttering cloud of multicolored petals that you collect, look incredible.

While style certainly seems to outweigh substance in Flower, that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the midst of all the ear-splitting, neon-lit chaos of the Tokyo Game Show, Flower was a soothing oasis, one that I'm eager to return to in the comfort of my own home.