ELOH is a puzzle game that has you redirecting tiny projectiles around the screen in an attempt to have them hit a target. Each stage has a different starting layout where there are various types of blocks scattered around that you can reposition in order to achieve that goal. Gameplay is also accompanied by calm BGMs, and every block, when hit, produces a tone, giving something of a musical texture to the experience.

In fact, ELOH is reminiscent of puzzle games like Auditorium, only perfectly deterministic, i.e. much better. There's 84 puzzles to solve, and the challenge level isn't very high, which makes it best as a game to unwind to. I remember buying it way back, in a lazy Saturday morning, and binging it the whole way through.

For three dollars, it's basically a steal.

If flOw tried to have engaging gameplay but mostly managed to be a game where the fun is in the aesthetics, Flower just embraces that part of the experience from the get-go, and winds up a much better game in the process. Flower puts the player in control of a gust of wind carrying petals whose job is to run through flowery fields, flying over flowers to bloom them. As more flowers bloom, the land becomes more beautiful and more paths open up. That's basically it.

flOw's beautiful visuals and sounds are back with a budget this time around: Flower is a game to play with headphones on to relax, just quietly appreciating not only the idyllic scenery and the beautiful soundtrack, but the sounds from the gentle rustling of the grass and the musical tones produced by each flower. One downside compared to its predecessor, though, is that the motion controls are slightly more annoying this time around, as maneuvering in a 3D space with the Sixaxis makes it super easy to overshoot targets.

There are six levels to play, but aside from the environments and time of day, not much changes between them. Like with flOw, Journey it is not, but if you need something pretty to look at for a few hours, Flower is one of the best possible picks out there.

In flOw, you play as a microscopic creature swimming in the ocean. Your objective is to move deeper underwater while eating as much food as you can. That food is found both in plankton floating about, as it is in other waterborne beings trying to do the same as you. Some will be much larger, others, much smaller than you, but nevertheless, every one of them is a potential food source that you should work to attain while not becoming their prey yourself.

It is a strikingly simplistic game, and purposefully so: it was born from Jenova Chen's (yes, of Journey fame) master thesis that dealt with Flow theory and Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment, both of those being concepts that are very important to the experience of playing games. To give a brief summary: Flow theory is the idea that, for us humans, when we're performing a task, we can be in multiple states of mind depending on the difficulty of said task: if it's too hard, we become frustrated; too easy and it becomes boredom. However, if the difficulty is just right, we enter a state of satisfaction called the Flow state, which is conducive to keeping doing the same thing.

Games often count on the Flow state to keep us going, and it's easy to see where DDA slots into this idea: if the game can dynamically adjust itself to match its player, making it so they're never stuck but also are never stomping it, it would, in theory, create a more satisfying experience. This has been experimented with since videogames became mainstream consumer products, but would really pick up between the sixth and seventh generation of consoles, where games had become reasonably complex that there were multiple variables that could be tuned invisibly to the player, adjusting the experience.

Famously, Resident Evil 4 (2005) used such a system, and that game was moderately well received. It kind of had its fans, and possibly influenced the industry for years after its release. The system looked at the player's performance in terms of accuracy and damage taken as well as the items they had in stock, assigning a score that then affected the number of enemies in encounters as well as their level of aggressiveness. Dying repeatedly would lower this score, though higher difficulties would prevent the score from going down too far -- Professional would lock it to max at all times, so there was no DDA. It worked so well that Resident Evil 4 (2023) still uses more or less the same ideas, and that's maybe the best game of 2023.

Discussing these concepts is unfortunately far more interesting than discussing flOw itself. flOw is fine: it stood out as an inventive title back when downloading games on a console was new, and its geometric, shimmering visuals accompanied by the calm ambience and echoing tones carried the experience. Even the motion controls, which are a bit shoehorned, become natural after a while since the creatures twist around so gracefully. It bears saying that they do make it hard to maneuver, which feeds into the game's actual problems.

In regards to its theoretical goal of maintaining a Flow state through DDA, flOw falls on either side of the curve most of the time. With no set goal or true failure state, there's little to strive for more than the aesthetics of a large creature, so one's either bored or entertained by something other than the challenge level. Besides, since threats mostly come in the way of aggressive creatures who maneuver much more effectively than yours, it's tough to feel legitimately challenged: most "deaths" will come from being suddenly zerg-rushed without much of a chance to react.

To be fair, there is a bit of variety in the form of different playable creatures: the "snake" can swim faster, the "jellyfish" can spin to lure prey, the "manta" can dash forward, the "electric eel" can paralyze prey to consume them as they're defenseless, the "predator" will lunge at enemy weak points, and finally, the "man-o'-war" can shield itself, then bash enemies to stun them for a bit. Most abilities are not super useful due to the controls, except for paralysis, which is brutally overpowered. Aposematism, yo.

It's a cheap and great looking game, though, and if all you want is to burn a few hours looking at pretty pixels, by all means, go right ahead -- flOw is a great pick. But in the year of 2024, players who hear of the game from publications from its time of release will be confused as to why it garnered such relevance back in the day.