There is a line of parking meters in front of me. They’re ugly, and they are in my way. Each of them is identical, as videogame objects generally are; whorled and cross-hatched like a dollar bill, a perfectly concrete and clear depiction of what a parking meter “should” be. I would gladly crack each of them open for their points, but their armor is too thick, their file too close to my side of the screen. A much more threatening fleet of easy chairs drifts slothfully towards me, opening fire at their own pace. These “seats of power”, as the in-game manual calls them, are worth less yet pose much more of a threat. They are my target, for this moment. I wish I had some cola right now. We all wish we had more cola, but it never lasts.
The early 19th century was a time of rapid change. Granted, the modern day is also a time of rapid change, but that was the time in which “rapid” was completely redefined. Planes, trains and automobiles made moving people and cargo magnitudes easier; telephones and radios gave one’s voice presence without your own personal presence. Within a single lifetime, ideas could suddenly spread across continents with the ease of a stiff breeze. Ideas were no longer the property of great men with days made of leisure time, nor were they always shouted from on high by authority figures, Great Persons to be written about in history books. Thus modernism was formed.
Modernism is reactionary. In the 18th century, art was about creating a perfect vision of reality. Frescoes and oil paintings strove to recreate their subjects in color, tone and detail. Being an artist meant years of studying - not just practicing, but imitating. There was only one true way to realists, namely, reality. Modernism is the opposite of that, all solid blocks of primary color and clean expression through dynamic movement. While it rarely reflects reality perfectly, and might not even depict a specific “thing,” Modernist art creates emotion through very basic designs.
“FLOMM” is an elaborate homage to that attitude which has become rare as of late. Steve Mehallo, the creator of FLOMM, has created a fake art movement in celebration of the attitudes our ancestors shared, back when rebellion meant something. FLOMM is a name with no obvious meaning, thumbing its nose at titles that feel they have to be descriptive; it wouldn’t look out of place next to arcade cabinets with titles like “Xelious” or “Arkanoid”. Its website has an intuitive and friendly design that works equally well on desktops and smartphones, but click on its manifesto and you are bombarded with a wall scroll of beautifully disorganized thoughts. “new generations exist to piss off the previous”, says an askew sound byte. “Observe the world around you,” says a circle, literally forcing you to actively observe by turning the image, “record what you see+experience”. Like many teachers, FLOMM paradoxically encourages the reader to think for themselves.
But the question you’re asking is…regardless of what the game is based on… HOW IS THE FUCKING GAMEPLAY?
It’s pretty much acceptable, but not outstanding.
It’s a side scrolling shooter, like Defender prototyped and Gradius codified. Specifically, it’s a sidescrolling shooter balanced for an iPhone’s touchscreen controls, which is no mean feat. Your left thumb moves the player character (which is anything from an aeroplane to a ® symbol to the word “und”), and your right thumb taps the screen to fire a bullet. There is almost no lag between input and reaction, very important in a hectic genre like this. The in-game instructions merely say “drag to move, tap to shoot”, which is not totally clear and may result in dying repeatedly while tapping on your ship and wondering why it won’t shoot. Then again, the lack of hand-holding tutorials is refreshing and the game is simple enough to pick up by yourself.
FLOMM’s main difference is that your enemies are symbolic concepts of everything Modernism stands against. You fire bullets into the “rotting extravagance” of Rococo flourishes, bash through classical Ionic columns flung at you out of context, break clocks and hourglasses that dare to tell you what time it is. Even banal words themselves are the enemy, from the general (“Junk Mail”, “Bad Air”) to the curiously specific (“Quaint Watercolor”, “Cheese Food Product”), all ripped off of newspaper like a crude ransom note. Every enemy is a monochrome ink print churned out in the same mass-produced style; the manual refers to them as “ThEY”, as in “They won’t understand it”. The player character is brightly colored and simple, abstracted so much that you stand out among the fleet of richly detailed, meaningless junk you shoot at. Even the bullets are coordinated, with ThEY firing literal lead musket balls or rifle bullets and the player’s tapping producing streaks with the word “TAT” engraved on the side. Though the setting is weird, it’s never unclear where your character is or what you should be doing.
But shooting will only prolong your life, not achieve your goals. There is a boss at the end of each randomly generated level-the same boss, an absurd pikelhaube-clad caricature of authority mockingly called a “ThWINGh” in Seussian fashion. Firing a few bullets into his mouth will cause him to explode beautifully while leaving the afterimage of a clock, a silent reminder that he will be back. The solution is to instead feed the ThWINGh your powerups. You have a small assortment of items- soybeans for a spread shot, garlic for a smart bomb (a cheeky literal interpretation of the manifesto’s nutritionist tangent)- but what you want is a small, harmless red circle, the “Neu”. Each one you gather gets flung at the end boss, adding a percent to a meter and visibly corrupting it with color, “painting over it” as it were. Completely subverting The Man results in an actual ending, which this author has personally never seen.
FLOMM is not actually a hard game. Even the highest difficulty rating only increases the intensity of enemy spawns in exchange for more points, an exchange well worth it. When you have a spread shot powerup active, everything in its cone of influence dies for its ten second duration. When you don’t, survival is more a matter of steering around fleets of ridiculous enemies and seeking out the most fragile things to shoot at. When worst comes to worst, coffee power-ups restore your lifebar, and yes, a side scrolling shooter has a lifebar. Enemy patterns are not that hard to interpret, and not even the ThWINGh will surprise you most of the time.
The true enemy is thumb cramps. Note that the instructions say, “Tap to shoot”, as in tap for each individual bullet in a game where there’s no reason to ever stop firing. Taking hits is not so much a matter of blundering into bullets so as it is hurting your hand from repetitive stress and colliding with something you physically cannot shoot. Perhaps this is a metaphor for how painful the life of an artist can be, though an artist’s life is also fruitless; Neu power-ups spawn so infrequently even on the highest difficulty that whole levels are wasted progress. The length of the game is random, and that’s not always a good thing.
One last small gripe, almost petty in scope, is that the file for this game app is HUGE. FLOMM weighs in at over 120 MB, about four times the space of a cheap iPhone game like Angry Birds. Granted, the music and graphics are well worth the extra size, but be prepared to clean out some older apps to make room if you are not playing on an iPad or other meaty device.
Is this game worth the 2.99 US$ price tag? Probably. Even if the gameplay itself is nothing new and a bit janky, the concept is neat and the mechanics are without the burden of modern consumer-driven, social network interactive, lowest common denominator appeal. It’ll make you think, which is more than some games these days can say.