Flower, Sun and Rain : DS
Flower, Sun and Rain falls only slightly short of being a total masterpiece, and that’s sad because for so long it promises so much. Unfortunately, a little before the end it cascades into a chaos of crossing plots and unresolved storylines which prevent it from being the near perfect experience it should be.
Let me say now, there is little chance that FSR is everyone’s taste; this is a slow paced, surreal Japanese story game from respected game designer Suda51. For a a long time I wondered exactly how I’d place it, and then I realised what it was: Professor Layton for adults. Like Layton, you have puzzles to solve and like Layton you progress through the story in a linear fashion solving those puzzles as you go. Unlike Layton though, the puzzles can on occasion take longer than thirty seconds, and the storyline stretches the boundary of what your mind can take both in understanding and cohesion.
The story is about a guy (you) who is a ‘searcher’ - a man who likes to find things. This he does by plugging his computer-type-device into various objects and inputting numbers which are the answers to the puzzles set. He is stuck for the beginning of the game in a hotel (the Flower, Sun and Rain hotel, no less) and wanders around solving the little problems of the hotel residents while desperately trying to get out to stop a terrorist from blowing up a plane, but the plane blows up anyway, and the day resets groundhog-day-like and you wake up with the same cup of coffee and do it all again, but not before a girl chases a pink crocodile around. Oh, and you are always late for breakfast, no matter how hard you try, and the coffee tastes bad, and the other characters in the game are cryptic and odd and just want to mess you around. The storyline is intriguing and very much keeps you going back for more, and the characters are clever and interesting. There’s some clever fourth-wall breaking, and some thoughtful and amusing scripting in there too, which seems to have survived the translation process intact, but it is oh so Japanese, in that way… you know the way…
The puzzles are worked out from deciphering bits of a fifty page document provided to you in game and by the end the entire document is embedded in your memory and you can probably recite it. Almost every puzzle has its answer here but they are hidden in a variety of ways, some clever, some annoyingly obvious. For example, an early puzzle has you trapped in a room with a camera set up to take a picture of a chair (or someone in it); digging through the book you find a reference to a similar picture and by inputting the camera settings described in the book into the camera, you solve the puzzle and can get out of the room. It is very refreshing to actually have to think on occasion, but if anything the problem is that the level of puzzles is random, and sometimes it is literally as simple as adding four to five and inputting the result.
Graphically the game has its own style which I have seen criticised in many reviews; personally I found it entirely appropriate and endearing. Conversely, the soundtrack is thoroughly enjoyable and justifiably praised by all who have taken the time to write about it; in fact, it is so good, I found myself plugging the DS into the computer speakers so it had more power to it and I don’t do that often! Both graphics and sound add to the depth of the experience however, which is all about drawing you in and enveloping you in its own weird world.
One of the other factors which seems to court controversy is the slow paced nature of the game - to get from location to location, you literally have to walk there and some of the walks are long. It is tempting to say it’d benefit from a teleport around system, but it wouldn’t; if anything it is those long walks with the music playing away that allow you to take the time to digest what you are doing and play with the concepts in your mind. There’s a lot to take in and while much of it can be dismissed as game bollocks, there’s some genuinely thoughtful work here and it doesn’t hurt to walk along the beachfront for five minutes while you think about what’s going on. Believe me though, when I say you won’t work it out.
Playing this game is somewhat like crossing a book of logic puzzles with the middle section of Lost or the X Files, while listening to Casio versions of Debussy and musing on the nature of time. It’s just all a bit strange, such that you relish the sections with the large pink crocodile to ground you back in normality.
So what is it that stops it being perfect? In short, the ending. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t great and it doesn’t resolve even half the questions you have asked yourself by the end. I’m all for ‘work it out yourself’ endings but really, some of the questions are never going to make sense. To find out afterwards that it is a sequel to another game released exclusively in Japan was a little harsh; the internet tells me it makes a lot more sense if you’ve played that too. I hear there’s a DS version of said game in the works, with a worldwide translated release, and I look forward to getting my hands on it, but until then, parts of the plot of Flower, Sun and Rain will have to remain a little bit of a mystery. That all said, I’d definitely consider myself a fan of this little game which I picked up secondhand for £3. Interestingly, the person who owned it before me never gave it the time it deserved - the previous save file hadn’t gotten past the first real puzzle; ah well, his (her) loss, my gain.
I bought it because I’ve been looking to try some of Suda51’s work and I’m not disappointed. I feel I have become part of something a little larger in the gaming world and I recommend it to anyone who considers themselves a real gamer, just because it is a little bit of computer game history, I think. To anyone who isn’t after having their mind screwed with and likes the idea of ‘good’ graphics and action in their games, well, steer clear of this at all costs.
Flower, Sun and Rain… it’s brilliant… just not perfect.
