Up to Speed: Flowerworks

With the number of WiiWare announcements lately, some of the more interesting games were bound to fly under the radar. We usually end up doing one of these Up to Speed features when that happens, so here’s one for Flowerworks.

Flowerworks originally debuted as a downloadable PC title by Nocturnal Entertainment. The concept sounds very reminiscent of Pikmin. You play as Follie, an alien gardener that crash-lands on a strange planet named Elilia. While looking for a way off, she’s confronted by gnomes, which seem to be the uncooperative fauna of this world.

Follie decides to set out and track down her Flowerworks seeds — these being flowers native to her home world — to help her get off Elilia. In order to do that, she needs to gather and feed pollen to her Flowerworks. When these flowers bloom, they erupt in a series of fireworks (named…Flowerworks) that help the surrounding flora grow. The Nintendo influence becomes a little more obvious when the press release mentions building up your "Star Power."

Nocturnal describe Flowerworks as an action-adventure game that’s between 15-25 hours in length. The press release mentions things like "a huge world to explore" and "50 distinct levels to complete." Given WiiWare’s 40 MB filesize restriction, it’ll be interesting to see how much can be squeezed in without making the experience repetitive.

There’s been no mention of if the WiiWare version will differ from the PC version in any significant way with regard to actual content, but if you’re curious, you can try out the PC demo to see if it tickles your fancy.