This game has a good concept but I never managed to get into the proverbial flow state, mainly due to the awkward controls.

The gameplay idea of “eat things smaller than you and get bigger” is inherently satisfying, and paired with the abstract beauty of Flow’s bizarre creatures that expand their forms in different ways, they really had something here. Add in a bit of complexity with different pickups and creatures that interact with individual behaviours and it sounds good on paper.

My main problem was that on most platforms (PS3, PS4, Vita), your movement is controlled only with the gyroscopic motion of the controller/system. On Vita this was extra uncomfortable because then your screen is also moving, but even with a Dualshock it’s not ideal. I ended a few play sessions prematurely with sore arms, and you just can’t get the precise movements you need. The PSP port is analogue stick-capable, but that’s not the version I bought, and it didn’t get the expansion pack. The earlier PC-based version also presumably has traditional controls and a cleaner minimalist art style to boot (I found the motion and bloom of the full version’s graphics tiring on the eyes).

The game is top-down, with representations of aquatic organisms floating around a small arena. To progress you move down planes into the screen (sometimes accidentally), eating or avoiding the other creatures you encounter. Get to the bottom and you unlock a new creature with a unique shape and a different ability, such as a lunge, a shield, or a paralysing touch. This helps keep things fresh for a while, although some feel too slow, or too fast to control well. It’s all accompanied by vague ambient sounds mingling with the jingling aural feedback of your own actions.

At times Flow feels like an interactive toy in its simpler phases, or a tech demo with its forced motion control scheme. Which to be fair is pretty much what it is, but the reputation of TGC and Jenova Chen may have artificially inflated its status, at least in my eyes. Taking it as it is, it’s a decent little experiment that doesn’t really succeed.