Chill-out games: Osmos and flOw

If you've had enough of First-person shooters, racing simulations and other high-octane gaming for a while and are looking for some peace and relaxation instead you might like this. I discovered Osmos thanks to this Debian guy's blog. As he says, it's not free software, but it's cross-platform and for only $10 you get the Mac, Windows and Linux versions. We'll probably never use the first two but hey. There's also a demo for each platform on the site.


Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

Osmos reminded me of flOw which I first came across browsing the PS3 Store from sound theme ambient and concept. Both have a certain fluid feel to it and are set in the microcosm where you got to eat to evolve and stay alive. Like real life then. Both are entertaining while allowing you to chill.
flOw is a flash game for the PC and as such platform-independent. The source code of the flash version has been publicly released as a learning tool. It is free to play on the PC, but the PS3 version used to be £3.99 (in the UK), or apparently $7.99. There's a good description here on Wikipedia.
It's beautiful, some screenshots can be found here. Not bad for a thesis with the aim "to realize player-centric Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) in video games, which creates optimized video game experiences for different types of players".



Got to be careful now not to overload this site with multimedia content. This was supposed to be a quick loading page in the KISS tradition, but it's difficult to do when doing reviews and taking all these nice screenshots to illustrate what's going on.

Thanks for dropping by.