Thatgamecompany's three game deal with PlayStation gave them room to develop the three games that put them on the map; namely Flow, Flower, and Journey. A kind of unsung deal that ended up being incredibly fruitful and helped guide the winds across the industry for the following decade and beyond. Without Flow, we wouldn't have Flower - and without the lessons learned from Flower, we wouldn't have the absolute avalanche of games that almost dogmatically follow Journey's schema.

Flow is kind of interesting in that it started as a student project that birthed a Flash browser game, of which was somehow successful enough to catch the eye of Sony. It's all simple stuff, the title and core design philosophy is a fairly convincing play on the book ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’, of which theorises that a degree of flow can be fostered in an environment that allows a person a subtle control of the difficulty of an activity - suggesting tools to keep a task from becoming so easy they get bored, or so hard they get stressed. The game kind of does that I guess (overabundance of food/health + everpresent ability to quickly progress) but I tend to think of that on more arcadey shmup terms lol. Flow's PS3 version is more or less the same as the browser game, albeit with some of the production values that really sold the floaty underwater effect under the then-exciting 1080p resolution. Even as a kid, I recall being unenthused about it, I thought it was a nice Um Bongo comedown if anything.

Ultimately TGC by this point had their foot in the door, and were able to get to work on their next game, an entirely new project based on nothing they've made prior. Flower does have that "we're here, so let's have a nice time" vibe. The developers talk in their commentary packaged in the Journey Collection about how they were struggling to make the gameplay any fun, burning through prototypes with enemies, hazards, rain, combos and growing mechanics. Ultimately they settled on a gameplay loop that is very passive, practically sidestepping the responsive difficulty framework of Flow and veering into a sort of soft rhythm game about spreading influence across a landscape without any. The responsive music system in place is an incredibly subtle one, but a bit of a stroke of genius that really sells the emotion in the winds - activating a flower communicates with the background track and informs which chord is to be played, creating something of a melodic riff when you brush over a line of bulbs. The levels do a good job at embodying their flower’s unique desires for life, colour, wind, light etc. thru their gameplay - and the journey is punctuated with imo wonderful visuals and music. Each stage has such a strong identity to them, emboldened by their stark colour schemes and ever-changing instrumentation. I’m incredibly fond of the strong fisheye lens on the player’s perspective, artistically framing sequences to lovely effect, and also allowing the bustling grassy fields to feel all-encompassing. That final act still gets me.

Flower is all very quaint now, I do get that - I have a lot of residual respect for this game from playing it at release, when you couldn’t just get grass like this into your game with a free engine plugin. Doesn’t feel like it in current year, but it was a bit of a trailblazer, and true enough to Journey, is imo up there with the best in class. Not a game for everyone, but a game for sensitive thugs who need hugs. Ultimately I feel a lil mournful about the fact that Sony is so farcking disinterested in drumming deals like this any more - extending their paws to up-and-coming studios with a bee in their bonnet, giving them a chance to spin themselves into madness and create something industry defining. Support artists folks!!!!