Game Reivew: Flower

Two weeks ago I picked up a new PS3 game for my wife; actually a three-in-one game, being Flow, Flower, and Journey.  All three were originally released as games on The Playstation Network which means they were downloadable content (games purchased online rather than as hardcopy discs).

Playing the three games in order of release, my wife quickly worked her way through Flow and moved onto Flower, which after watching the gameplay for a couple of days may be one of my new favourite games - right up there with Ico (although not quite at the level of Shadow of the Colossus).

Using no dialogue, the game takes place in the dreams of flowers, specifically a group of flowers on a small shelf in an urban apartment.  In the dreams, you control flower petals which travel across a landscape waking up other flowers and slowly, but surely bringing the landscape to life.  Like Katamari Forever,  the levels each start out easily and get tricky very quickly - also like Katamari, the game is quite addictive.

Genre Character of the Week: Wander

A few months ago I reviewed the videogame ICO and listed its main character as my genre character of the week. This week I go back to a game from the same company Shadow of the Colossus and will take a close look at its main character, Wander.

Remembering that ICO had a really basic setup (captured kids escape from castle), I was thinking that this game would have a similarly simple plot, and you know what it does – basically a guy named Wander heads in to a forbidden area with his dead girlfriend and demands that the ruler of this land bring her back to life. He is told that to perform this action sixteen statues must be destroyed, and each of these statues have a living representative in the real world that must be destroyed as well. So Warder heads off with his trusty horse Argo and begins the process of defeating each of these Colossuses... Colossi... Colo... Creatures.

So yeah – simple premise, very little dialogue, virtually no supporting characters, but wow – the graphics are amazing and the battles are shocking in how amazing they are. Rather than thinking of this game as a fighting game or an RPG game, it might be best to think of it as a puzzle game, as each of the creatures has to be defeated in a certain way. So far I’ve flat-out fought one, hidden from another, rode two and climbed the beard of a third – I’m only halfway through at this point but this game is pretty freaking cool.

Wander doesn’t have any obvious connection to Ico (the main character of ICO) and his horse Argo is a heck of a lot easier to deal with than Yorba, but like the previous game, Shadow of the Colossus is stunning in its music, visuals and overall concept.

Definitely a personal favourite.

Genre Character of the Week: Ico

So as I’ve been working my way through the PS3 catalogue of games I came across one called ICO/Shadow of the Colossus at in a bin at a grocery store for $20. I figured that although the games listed were PS2 games upgrade to work on the PS3, they came out to $10 each and hopefully someone thought they were good enough to be put on the newer system. (NOTE: After writing the review, it became apparent to me that both games actually rank highly on many gamers best games ever lists – but I was unaware of this until after writing the post)

Anyway, I haven’t touched Shadow of the Colossus yet, but I did just finish the other one and can now introduce you to this week’s genre character: ICO.

The game is incredibly minimal in back story, so here is just about everything you know about the character: he’s about ten-years-old, he comes from a village in some sort of fantasy world, he has horns (see picture), and because he has horns, his village has sacrificed him to die of starvation in some creepy sort of statue in a giant spooky castle.

Due to a mild earthquake the statue breaks, freeing Ico, who then proceeds to try and escape from the castle. Along the way he finds a strange girl named Yorda who he spends the majority of the game trying to help escape (she can be both intriguing and incredibly frustrating throughout), and the majority of the game is sort of like Myst but with fighting involved. Basically you solve puzzles and move Ico and the girl through the castle looking for a way to escape.

Although you (the player) use the character of Ico to solve the various puzzles to escape from the castle, as a character this little kid is really smart and very dedicated to rescuing his friend (even though they don’t speak the same language).

In the end the game took me two weekends to finish (so it was pretty short), but at the same time it was visually stunning and well worth the purchase, and for me a big part of that was due to the title character.