fl0w is a soothing and visually stunning downloadable game for the Playstation 3.
SCEA sent me a final build of the game for my debug and I spent a chunk of time last night playing through it and I quite enjoyed the experience. I haven't yet played the offline multiplayer experience, but plan to check that out later today. It supports up to four players, any of whom can drop in at any time.
When fl0w was first announced for the PS3, I immediately went out and tried the game on the PC. fl0w was originally a Master of Fine Arts thesis from Jenova Chen, a gradute from USC School of Cinematic Arts and one of the creator's behind another visually stunning game: Cloud.
While I enjoyed fl0w on the PC, I quickly became bored with it. It seemed too repetitious and didn't appear to have enough of a framework to keep things interesting.
In the PC version of the game you drift around a sea of lights and sound absorbing smaller entities and avoiding larger ones as you try to grow your organism in both size and complexity.
As you drift around with your mouse, you can absorb certain organisms to drift down a level and others to drift up a level. The whole experience was very Zen in a way, but again, it seemed to be missing something.
The PS3 version seems to have found that missing component.
The most noticeable difference with the game is that you control it with the Sixaxis' tilt controls. And I don't mean like steering your amoeba like a car. No, to play the game you sort of hold the controller flat and then tilt it in the direction you want the organism to move. So to move forward you tilt the controller away from you, to move sideways you tilt the controller on its side.
Initially, I found this form of control very off-putting, but within ten minutes I was liking it and within 20 I wasn't even thinking about it anymore. Soon after I was zipping around the colorful soup of sound and shapes, deftly avoiding some things and chasing down others.
Where in the PC game I never seemed to quite grasp any set of rules or methodology, in the PS3 version I quickly came to grasp what I could and couldn't eat and what things I could eat, but only carefully. I also learned that each type of thing I gobbled up played different music.
There were times that I felt someone had finally turned Electroplankton into a real game.
After playing as the original type of organism for a bit I fell through to a level that allowed me to select a second, different, type of growth. Again I played through the game, noticing some subtle and not so subtle differences in everything from movement, to what you could and couldn't eat, to the sights and sounds of the game.
After playing non-stop, literally, for about two hours and with five different creations I found myself swiming through a sea of credits. I had, if such a thing is possible in fl0w, beaten the game.
While I'm a bit disappointed that the game only took two hours to "beat" I recognize that the game really isn't something you play through and put down. It's more like a toy. Sure it has objectives and a way to succeed and fail, but fl0w is mostly about the trip not the destination.
fl0w is most certainly going to be one of those mega hits for the PS3. Brian Crecente
(
ing charge for the co-op though. I might actually wait until some co-op is released.
