flOw Turns Twenty and Still Refuses to Explain Itself

flOw begins with no menu, no tutorial and no instruction of any kind. The game starts the moment it loads, and you are already swimming.

That decision, made by Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark for a 2006 Flash release tied to Chen’s master’s thesis, is the whole design in miniature. flOw does not explain itself because it does not need to. You are a small, multi-segmented worm in an aquatic space, and the only verb that matters is eat.

Trailer, via IGN.

A Worm, Five Creatures and No Menus

The player guides a worm-like organism through a top-down world built from two-dimensional planes stacked vertically. A blurred version of the layer below sits in the background of each one. Most organisms drifting in those planes are non-confrontational, made of cells that add segments to your creature when consumed.

Your creature eats automatically when something edible comes close. There are no guidelines, no prompts and no fail state in the usual sense. Aggressive, multi-segmented creatures appear on certain planes and will bite off your segments to regrow their own. Kill one by eating all its segments and it releases a burst of cells that can restore health, briefly widen your mouth or sprout decorative protrusions.

Lose a fight and you do not die. You float up one plane. That is the entire punishment.

The structure rewards curiosity over mastery. All planes except the highest and lowest hold two specially colored organisms that move you up or down a level when touched. Players are never required to eat anything. They can climb or descend whenever they like.

Dynamic Difficulty and the Flash Version’s Secret

flOw’s difficulty system comes from Chen’s research into dynamic difficulty adjustment at the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media Division, and from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow — the state of absorbed attention the game is named for. Players of different skill levels can tune the experience intuitively, at their own pace, without a settings screen.

The Flash version hides a second creature behind a challenge. Beat an aggressive organism on the bottom plane and you can replay as a jellyfish-like organism. Reach the bottom again and you find your original worm waiting. Defeat it and the game restarts as that creature.

The 2007 PlayStation 3 version, reworked by Thatgamecompany with help from Santa Monica Studio, shipped in full HD at 1080p with 5.1 surround sound and SIXAXIS motion controls on the DUALSHOCK. SuperVillain Studios handled the PlayStation Portable version in 2008 and the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions in 2013.

What flOw Got Right, in Order

Ranked by how much each element still holds up:

1. The visual and audio design. Crisp deep blue, a surreal biosphere, a creature that reads clearly against every layer. Reviewers praised this at release and it has not aged badly.
2. The no-menu opening. Dropping a player straight into water is a braver choice than it looks, and it teaches the game’s only rule in seconds.
3. The dynamic difficulty system. It works, but it works quietly, which means most players never notice it doing anything.
4. The combat with aggressive creatures. Segments traded back and forth is a fine idea that never develops past the first encounter.
5. The five creatures and their environments. Variety on paper, thin in practice.

The Flash version pulled 100,000 downloads in its first two weeks and had been played more than 3.5 million times by 2008. The PlayStation 3 release was the most downloaded game on the PlayStation Network in 2007 and took Best Downloadable Game at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards. It was nominated by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

More Art Piece Than Game

Here is the problem flOw never solves. Several reviewers at release called it more of an art piece than a game, and that read holds up. The planes stack, the worm grows, the cells drift — and none of it asks anything of you after the first ten minutes. There is no pressure, no escalation and no reason to descend rather than rise.

That is the point, and it is also the ceiling. flOw is a mood delivered with unusual confidence and almost no friction. What it lacks is a reason to keep playing once the mood has landed, and the aggressive creatures — the one system that could have supplied tension — stay shallow.

Worth playing for what it proved about design, and for the calm it produces. Not worth playing for a challenge it was never built to give.

dynamic difficulty · flOw · Indie Games · Jenova Chen · PS3 · Thatgamecompany