The Luminescent Circles of Life

Well, with a Playstation 4 in hand, might see something resembling semi-regular video game reviews around here again.

I didn't set out to get Flow. What I really wanted was Journey, but the easiest way to get a disc with that was to get the 3-pack of it, Flow, and Flower, all made by thatgamecompany. Flow is pretty straightforward. You are some sort of aquatic lifeform, swimming or floating with a bunch of other aquatic life, and you try to eat and avoid being eaten.

Everything is made of silvery outlines with at least one (but usually more) glowing spheres or rings within the outline. If you can eat all of another organisms spheres or rings, they dissolve. The larger, more complex organisms break up into smaller pieces (which you can also eat). The smaller ones are just devoured. Eating increases your creature's size and number of rings, helping you to survive, although your creature doesn't really die. You can also grow in complexity, adding elaborate wings or projections.

If all your rings are eaten, you are sent back up the water column to get your bearing and try again. At any given level, there's always one little flagellate with a blue center, and one with a red. Eat the blue, you'll go one level back up the column, while the red takes you one level back down. Get deep enough, you get the chance to play as a different organism. The end goals will be the same, but not all of them play alike. Some are swift, some just sort of drift or spin. At least one can poison what it comes in contact with, mostly as a defense mechanism. If you're poisoned, you can't eat until it wears off. Another can, not exactly paralyze, but at least slow down what it comes in contact with.

I had to figure all that out as I went along. The game didn't come with an instruction booklet, and to the extent the game tells you anything, it's that you tilt the controller to guide your creature and press a button to either get a burst of speed or use those other abilities. I figured out the poisoning thing (eventually) by having it happen to me. Until then, I couldn't figure out what was happening when my critter turned yellow.

It can be a mellow game if you want it to be. There's no time limit I ever saw, so if you just want to drift around a peaceful section, gobbling up little algae that can't fight back, you can. You can try to speedrun through, dodging the bigger critters, or go after them relentlessly. I usually avoided tangling with the bigger, more aggressive creatures if I could. Content to build my critter up on the little ones enough to have some cushion and make my way deeper.

But at one point I got fairly deep, to a spot where there was just one, immense version of the same kind of thing I was. It couldn't fit entirely on the screen if it was stretched out, and my critter was maybe a third its size. Since I didn't have to worry about anything else attacking me, I decided to just go for it and see if I could kill. And I did, eventually.

The music is a gentle background thrum, or someone humming with a lot of bass. Each time you eat something, there's a single note that rings above the background. Combined with the setting, which is variously-shaded water sometimes with bubbles in the background, it makes me think of just sitting and staring at a lava lamp. At least it does when I'm taking things easy. If I'm being aggressive, I barely notice the music. It doesn't distract and can enhance in the right circumstances.