flOw Hands-On: Mysteries of the Deep
Sony actually gave us an informative rundown--in English--of this quirky downloadable game first quietly exhibited at last month's Tokyo Game Show.
flOw's trippy underwater gameplay is as active or as lazy as you want it to be.
At the Tokyo Game Show, we came upon an unexpected, serene, aquatic action game called flOw that was just sitting there on the show floor, minding its own business, without any particularly informative English description. Luckily, Sony brought the downloadable game along to its San Francisco press event so we could try it again for ourselves and try to make some more sense of it. We also got to speak with Kellee Santiago, one of the game's original contributors, who explained a great deal about this mysterious game that will be available as an "e-distributed" title for the PlayStation 3 shortly after the system's launch next month.
So here's the story with flOw. It began as one of USC student Jenova Chen's graduate projects, which is available in simplified form as a Flash game that you can play right this moment. On the PS3, flOw has evolved with high-definition visuals (the game will run in 1080p at launch) and other, more sophisticated production values. But it's all based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 1990 work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which explores the human engagement with immediate activity, positing that man is happiest when completely at one with the action at hand.
What that means in gameplay terms is that flOw is as serene or as aggressive as you want it to be. You control a spiny-looking aquatic creature, swimming around and eating other organisms to grow and evolve. Or not. If you don't want to attempt to eat bigger creatures--which will in turn try to eat you--you're free to swim around lazily, and your fellow life forms will remain docile while you do. But to progress in the game, you've got to eat, which you do simply by swimming up behind and over other creatures. When you successfully eat another life form, its unique physical attributes will be added to your own, and naturally, the bigger you get the stronger you get and the more damage you can take from aggressors.
There isn't much more to the gameplay than that, from what we saw. A few colored organisms float nearby as you swim around. Eating blue ones will make you swim upward toward the surface and eating red ones will make you descend to the depths, where the boss of each area lurks. There are five playable creatures in the game, and each time you consume a boss, you'll rise to the surface and evolve into the next form to begin the new area.
flOw is simplistic from what we got to see, but it's big on concept, and it seems like the perfect sort of game to zone out with on your couch after a grueling day at the office. It's basically a game of eat-or-be-eaten, and you could probably swim around for hours and hours without actually engaging the core gameplay if you really wanted to. flOw's sparse visuals convey the feel of primordial underwater life quite well, and we imagine they'll look pretty nice on a good HD display, too. It's due out as a downloadable game on the PS3 sometime before the end of the year, so lucky early PS3 adopters should keep their eyes peeled for one of the more unique games we've seen in quite a while.
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- GameSpot Score7.1good
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flOw Review
There's not an awful lot of game here, but flOw still makes for an attractive and soothing showpiece.
- Feb 22, 2007
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