[Game Review] flOw

flOw was designed as an example of dynamic difficulty adjustment, where the player was subtly given control of their own difficulty.  In it you play as a simple organism made of shapes in a water environment.  You can grow by eating other organisms, and . . . that's about it really.  Segments of your body will glow and act as your health bar of sorts, and when it is depleted your little creature is sent back to the previous level.  Levels act as ocean depth here, where the deeper you go the more dangerous the creatures found there.  You can choose when you want to descend to a harder level or ascend back to someplace easier.  You can make it through each of these levels without consuming anybody, but that will make progressing lower more difficult.  Get to a low enough level and you will find an egg-like object that when eaten will unlock a new organism to play as and you are returned to the topmost level.  With each new creature comes newer monsters and your sense of attack will change, such as a spin attack that sucks in smaller organisms to be eaten or slowing your movement to a crawl but "poisoning" enemies that come in contact with you.  Outside of these minor changes in gameplay, the game is largely the same.

As an experiment, flOw is a soothing, pretty game that lets you play at your own pace.  The game was meant to work with the concept of the "flow state", where a game tries to keep a level of engagement between frustrating and boring.  The game partially fails on this, since the flow state requires a certain amount of engagement and difficulty in order to work.  Growing can be engaging briefly, but only so much as a clicker game or similarly structured passive game.  The game wants to lull you into something rather than truly engage you with any given mechanic, story, or even feeling since it's feeling is largely ambient, and as an often stated experiment rather than true game I can't really criticize it much.  flOw exists more as a pretty oddity, an hour long diversion worthwhile for how it shaped the studio that would later give us the acclaimed Journey.  It is no waste of time to play, but it also has little to offer other than novelty.  While I stand by my rating below, note that I mean it more as a scale of how much I recommend the game rather than to its true quality, because the game was upfront about what it wanted to do and it was alright at doing it.  That said, its a game that wants to exist more than it wants to be played.



5.0