PixelVixen707

It may surprise you to know that for Valentine’s Day, I want flowers. A for-real, professionally-bound bouquet. It can just have boring red roses. I would take a goth black-and-blue arrangement, too; I don’t care. As girly as it sounds, I really go for flowers on Valentine’s Day. Flowers are, simply, really pretty. And at least one day a year, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I didn’t get ‘em last year. But believe me, this time I’ve been hinting.

I have a soft side. If I didn’t, I never would have lasted five minutes at Flower, which is … “delightful,” and “refreshing,” and also sappy to the max. If you haven’t already read the gushing previews, here’s the capsule: it’s a game where you lead a floating petal across fields, to rejuvenate the plantlife and regreen barren landscapes. And that’s about it.

I’m with Ben Fritz of Variety, who argued that the PS 3’s rep as a console for art games doesn’t help it. But Flower is a weirdly highly anticipated game, partly because seeing this sleek, silent box pumping high-def images of flower petals on an HDTV sounds very, very gnarly. Take a break from the Blu-Ray of Planet Earth and smoke some nutmeg, the thinking goes, and you will be good and ready to drop a sawbuck on Flower.

The game creates an experience - which is another way to say it’s fantastically easy. Like flOw, you spend the first level learning how it works and enjoying the so-smooth motion controls, and subsequent levels add wrinkles - like the canyon chase in level three, where you lose control of your momentum and just fly along hitting as many buds as you can. The game takes control away from you on a whim, which makes a certain thematic sense, since you’re really just a rose bud that’s one gust away from getting stuck on a rock. But the sights draw you in - the thrill of breezing through tall grass, the cool dark of dead street lights looming late at night -

And ugh, I’m trying to sound poetic. The game does it to you. I agree Flower is an “art game,” but I have to qualify the title. By any other standard, the “art” in a game like this would be corny as all damn. If someone on the sidewalk tried to sell you a painting that looked like this, you’d balk. If your middle-aged aunt who gets stressed out by her job at the card shop gave you a CD of this wispy, New Age soundtrack - “Rachael, you should listen to this, it’s so good for your omega waves” - you’d bring it home, and hide it.

But it doesn’t seem that way in a game. The only way I can explain it is that the interactivity brings it closer to real life. After all, a flower isn’t corny until somebody takes a tacky photo of it. The flower itself did nothing wrong. In a videogame, you have a sliver more power to see and handle the flower to your own tastes. If you’re high, you’ll let the game lilt and meander; if you’re impatient, do speed runs. The experience can be real pretty, not contrived pretty.

I don’t like cornball paintings of flowers. But I do like flowers.