Restorative Ecology

Flower, third and final game in the set. You play as a flower petal, that drifts among fields. There are other flowers closed up all around and as you pass by, they open and emit a musical note. If you open all the flowers of a certain type in a given area, it may cause more flowers (usually of a different type) to emerge somewhere nearby. Or it might cause new life to rush over the entire field, restoring color to your surroundings.

A bit like when you'd complete a big mission in The Saboteur, but with less profanity and Nazi-killing. Is that an improvement? I don't know. Depends what you're in the mood for. Watching flower petals make their way across a field can be pretty relaxing.

There's no timer to the game I can see. So, as with Flow or Journey, you can take your time. Nose around for flowers hidden in hollows or beneath rocks to bring life to the maximum extent possible. There may be some sort of scoring system? When a level's completed, you return to a room where there's a collection of flower pots. The flower representing the level just completed will open and some number of leaves will land at the base of the stem. I always got either one or two, and I don't know which is better, or how the number was determined. Not really the point of the game, I'd imagine, and if I'm trying to find every flower, it's out of some completist notion, or simple curiosity at what might happen.

You steer by tilting the controller. The joystick - or any button - can act like a gust of wind that sends you rocketing forward. Otherwise, you just sort of drift, adding petals from the other flowers as you go until you're really steering a big, swirling mass of different colored petals.

That does make it difficult to guide, because I couldn't always tell where the "central" petal was in relation to the flower I was trying to reach. I'd miss flowers and have to swing the mass back around. If you do that too tightly, it seems to sort of "crash" into itself and just float in place. The turn radius of flower petals is lousy, apparently. The game does allow some wiggle room, where it doesn't take touching every flower necessarily to restore or awaken an area.

There's some sort of a story, vaguely, as each level brings you closer to the burnt out, abandoned ruins of a city. The closest thing to an enemy in the game are the broken remains of what look like electricity transmission towers, that can char the petals if you aren't careful (which is where the steering difficulties manifest the most.) Further along, more of the burnt, rusted metal will burst from the ground or canyon walls around you, trying to impede the path. That said, in a straight-line course, it isn't that hard to avoid them.

Overall, Journey is certainly my favorite of the three games. Flow and Flower are pretty even. Which one has the edge probably depends on what I want from a game at a given time.