Review: Flower

Mere minutes separated my completion of Killzone 2 from the beginning of Flower. Were it not for the grinding limitations of my 5Mb broadband dragging down the game's 600 something megabytes - each second further vanquishing my memory of any raging wars on foreign planets - the juxtaposition between each title would have been even more profound.

Never before has a comparison been so diametric: The epic struggle for supremacy amidst a world of dubious politics, blind devotion and brute-force attitudes was unconditionally deconstructed and replaced by an experience so tranquil and delicate that it was bordering on euphoric.

The experience is unfounded in accordance with today's standards: there are no weapons; no contrived vehicle sequences and no macho protagonists - Hell, there isn't even people. In fact, such familiar carnage is lost in Flower's graceful simplicity. A dependency on intricate narratives feels almost ludicrous in its presence since it does so much with so little.

That's frightfully pretentious, I know, but Flower offers a particularly emotional journey that is seldom seen in today's games industry.

On the Winds of Love

Controlling nothing but a gust of wind, you must swoop across the landscape collecting the petals of nearby flowers and using them to rejuvenate the surrounding environment. The concept is primitive and arguably grounded in the seemingly perennial debate of the world's CO2 destroying Earth's natural beauty, but it's practically irrelevant: Flowing around the dilapidated fields at the whim of your Dualshock's six-axis, your movements parting the grass below you and a soft musical note highlighting your every encounter with a new flower, the game's somewhat spiritual allure becomes apparent.

As flowers open up and unleash a petal into your wind stream, you grow in length and density to become a twirling snake of multi-coloured floral beauty. Though there are many, many flowers to collect throughout each level, some promoting your exploratory instincts and rewarding them with trophies, in order to progress you must harvest those with a glowing aura, which either unlock more flowers, fill the surrounding landscape with all the incandescence of a rainbow, turn on a wind turbine or simply turn off one of the petal-sizzling electricity pylons.

Above All Else

As beautiful as the game is, this reliance on item collection is what truly grounds Flower well within the realm of games: when you've missed a flower or two and have you traipse back over the landscape to find it, the subtleties and gentile nature dissipate as you've essentially missed a switch that unlocks the next area.

Still, it's never souring as the compulsion to uncover and save the next set of beautifully realised hills and fields on top of the intrinsic appeal of simply soaring through the sky is worth enduring any hunt for a lost flower.

It's difficult to ascertain whether the experience is genuinely transcendental or simply so far from today's endless stream of shooters that it just feels that way. But what it comes down to is how well realised the environments are. The delicate grace of the gameplay and the equally elegant music create a rather moving experience unlike any other. It's up to you whether or not it's art or simply a pretentious tech demo, but I'm all for the former. Flower is a very unique game indeed. Put this and Ico next to each other and I'll cry my eyes out.