Hands-On: Flower (PS3)

So here's the story: after releasing flOw in 2007, the studio behind the successful PlayStation Network game wanted more. And what's more 'flOw'? flOw + er = Flower. At least that's what lead designer Jenova Chen told us.

Chen, whose senior thesis project at USC resulted in flOw, likened that game to a haiku, each level being a repeating pattern. Flower, he says, is more like a poem, telling a story. Chen told us that most video games take place in an aggressive, angry emotional realm. He wanted to explore the notion of alternate emotions in video games and Flower attempts to do just that, manipulating the player's feelings through a combination of audio and visual cues.

So how does it work? You control the wind, starting off with a single petal floating in your air stream. As you guide this petal into clusters of flower blooms, they blossom and generate even more clusters. 'Pollinating' all the flowers in a small area will activate that level's objective (like changing the color of the field, or starting windmills -- more on that later) and play a brief interactive cutscene. Controls are simple -- you direct the wind by tilting the Sixaxis controller, much like with flOw. Holding down any button accelerates the wind.

Chen recruited USC classmate Vincent Diamante -- who helped score Chen's first game, Cloud -- to work on one of the key elements of the game, music. Ambient music plays while you are exploring the levels, but each additional flower you touch plays another note. The notes in each section are chosen from a small pool of options as composed by Diamante. We couldn't get Chen to reveal how, exactly, that process works but it seems to be the result of both user actions and preset selections. The one detail he confirmed was that the speed at which you approach the flower alters the note that will be played.

Each level has a different objective. Even though you'll get there the same way -- pollinating clusters of flowers -- the result of your actions will vary. In the first level we saw, we turned yellow patches of grass green by making flowers around the patches bloom. In a second level, we added color to the gray monotone hills. In a third, we activated windmills that guided us to new areas of the level. Although none of these levels are final -- the game isn't even in alpha yet -- we got the sense that the developers intend to continue the trend of having a 'mystery' in each level.

In fact, the completion of each level changes the menu screen. When we first entered the game, a single flowerpot perched on the windowsill of a dingy and dirty gray apartment. After the first level, the apartment appeared much cleaner, although still bland and fairly lifeless -- remember when we 'cleaned' up those yellow patches of grass? That's how this works. After the second level, where we brought color to the fields of flowers, the apartment was fully colored. We imagine that the more levels are completed, the better the apartment will appear.

The game is intuitive and plays well, primarily because we were able to set our own pace with it. If we wanted to play more aggressively, we could accelerate and sweep around the rows of blossoms, the music speeding up to match. If we wanted to play a more relaxing game, we could let go of the buttons completely and just glide around. Flower is super pretty too. The colors are vibrant, and the gameplay is smooth.

Although Flower brings a lot of fresh new ideas to the video game development discussion, it's still so largely conceptual that it's too early to tell how this game will turn out. If it ends up following through on its promise to make players feel like they've made a difference in the world, then it'll be a great game. But at the risk of sounding enormously snobbish, the game currently feels like a glorified screensaver. Yes, it has great ideas. It's an ambitious project, and we're excited that a developer is breaking out of the traditional video game mold and trying to innovate in unexplored realms. While we are definitely looking forward to seeing more as development progresses, Flower needs a little more blossoming before we're sure.