More Sasara Kusugawa + Flow
From Jekyll and Hyde, who did the original of my favourite picture of Sasara. She's back in the same style! Yay.
Thanks to Void from IRC for finding this game: FLOW, which will take up a lot of your time.
Designed by Jenova Chen, it aims to explore what creates "fun". The answer is "flow", which is the zone between anxiety and boredom. We learn this in PE, that we are at peak performance when we are neither too relaxed nor too anxious. It is possible to have "flow" playing normal games, but that depends a lot on the "ability" factor -- the game stays the same (i.e.: "challange" is the static factor), but the people playing it change according to their day-to-day existence. I have days when I suck terribly at FEAR Combat, and other days when I am positively owning the arena. This is the same for sports and other games. If it is a good day, my ability counterbalances the challenge perfectly and you get a good sense of enjoyment and achievement (as well as ranking) out of it.
With this game FLOW, the aim is to make the GAME generate "flow". That is, by its nature, it is universally appealing, simple to use, allows control, fairly easy, but not too easy, etc. With its minimalist nature (helped along by the sounds of the game) and inbuilt logic, this game is fairly addictive and has taken around an hour of my time away from me.
On the other hand, an earlier game of the same concept "Cloud", is a more unpolished implementation of the idea. Weighing in at 38.5MB, and using a full-screen interface, the controls are too hard to manage (particularly in terms of perspective), and many of them are counterintuitive. Also it is buggy in that if you alt-tab out of it, or accidentally brush your Windows button, the mouse stops working in the game.
"FLOW" has I think, 3 distinct 'levels' -- serpentine form, 'jellyfish' form, and manta form, in corresponding difficulty. To disintegrate other organisms, simply identify and 'eat' their key cells. These other organisms in turn will try to eat yours, so navigate properly and smartly. It is of course entirely possible to just skip any level with organisms which are too hard -- simply find and consume the red level-switcher. But you must at least disintegrate one boss (at the end) to gain access to higher evolutions. Left click to make the creature move faster.
The shapes and stuff in "FLOW" remind me greatly of Mushi from the anime Mushishi, or of micro-organisms under the microscope, or even of the translucent floaters which float before your eyes (I read somewhere that these are in fact dead and detached segments of blood vessels trapped in the fluid of your eye).
Post a Comment