4.5/5 ★ – heyitscarter's review of Flower, Sun, and Rain.

It's been three months since I completed my foray into Suda 51's dense Lynchian paradise in Flower, Sun and Rain. Much like it's processor The Silver Case, since the day I witnessed it's credits roll, it hasn't left my head for a second. I can still feel the sand of The Lospass between my toes. I can still hear Masafumi Takada's arrangements of classical and jazz standards wafting lazily through the air. It's a kind of infinite summer one can only dream of, following forward feet on pavement up and away to the Flower, Sun and Rain. FSR holds a unique place in SUDA51's catalogue of work, two years after it's forebearer and yet four years before his international appeal would begin to take shape with Killer7 and 2007's No More Heroes. Flower, Sun and Rain is a direct sequel to the acclaimed visual novel The Silver Case - though this is a fact it conceals from the player until the very end. Instead, it opts for a Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask style rejiggering for characters, themes, and elements in a hazy, groovy new thing. Director SUDA51 has previously stated that he treats the protagonist from his games more as thematic descendants than directly related people. For instance, Flower, Sun, and Rain's, protagonist - Sumio Mondo - may not share his surname with The Silver Case's Sumio Kodai, but he does share his face, mannerisms, and traces of his past. Much like the many different incarnations of Link throughout The Legend of Zelda. The Sumio we get in Flower, Sun, and Rain is a dead ringer for Twin Peaks' loveable FBI Agent Cooper. He begins every day by enjoying a fine cup of coffee and from his opening monologue he is immediately affable. Throughout FSR, the player will be spending a lot of time in Sumio's head. They will come to know him as intensely focused, though a bit of a layabout. As kind to a fault. As chipper but intolerant of those in his way. He's a man of contradictions - and also he is dumb as a box of rocks. I love him. Sumio wouldn't make it far if it wasn't for his trusty companion - his silver case - Catherine! A puzzle-solving machine that Sumio can plug into all the problems he encounters. For all intents and purposes, Catherine is a direct commune with you, the player. Sumio isn't solving these puzzles, he's simply plugging you into them and you are solving them, another beautiful little meta layer SUDA liked to weave into his earlier works about the direct relationship between you, the player, and the game. Ultimately, these two elements - your relationship with the game, and Sumio's thematic relevance to the rest of SUDA's catalogue - are the two pillars that make up "the point" of Flower, Sun, and Rain. Between those two pillars lies a lot of room to play, and play SUDA does. From a gameplay perspective, for instance - Flower, Sun and Rain begins as a simple puzzle game - it asks the player to read a relevant in-universe guide to Lospass island and pull clues from it to solve riddles. As the game builds, however - these riddles become more and more obtuse and the time between them longer. Eventually it all but ceases to be a game all together, and often asks the player to simply walk back and forth between two points for sometimes upwards of 30 minutes each direction, doing nothing but holding a direction and walking. All the characters begin to remark about how ridiculous this is. Yet Sumio keeps walking. Hours of holding down a directional button - correcting the movement slightly to straighten yourself on a path. Sumio is being trapped on The Lospass and in turn, so are you. So it leads to these beautiful little moments of catharsis, like in my favorite chapter "Clair de Lune." Where after nearly 20 minutes of holding a directional button, watching little Sumio trapse along the road, Debussy's titular Clair de Lune faded in softly as I climbed a lighthouse and look out acrossed the ocean, through the crisp night air to see big in the sky a beautiful full moon. There I was told to turn around and walk back. Instead, I stayed and looked at the moon a little longer. It cannot be understated how absolutely perfect the bossa nova beach-jazz of Takada's soundtrack is. Every day begins accompanied by a haunting prelude duet of strings and keys in Torn's "Morning." Often, it is followed by an arrangement of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No.1, lazing about the cozy hotel that is your prison. Of particular note are almost all arrangements of Gershwin's and Debussys' jazz standards like "I love you, Porgy," and "Raphsody in Blue." All throughout the games leitmotif featured in "One Resort" is sprinkled within - and finally, the titular track "Flower, Sun, and Rain" is a truly haunting bop the likes of Boa's "Duvet." As far as Sumio's thematic relevance to the rest of SUDA's catalogue, the player will come to find in the end that what we thought was a time-loop was instead different Sumio's living different lives, each passing the sum of their experiences onto the next until one is finally able to solve the riddle of his own imprisonment. This is beautiful not only textually because of our knowledge that The Silver Case's Sumio Kodai was perhaps the first Sumio to be imprisoned in the Lopass, but also metatextually - as this is relevant to both Sumio Tohba from SUDA's first project - and later Mondo Sumio, the protagonist of Killer is Dead. It's a thematic throughline in all SUDA's work about identity, asking ourselves weather we are more than the sum of our experiences - much like the Kamui of The Silver Case, and the player's relationship to these things. There's so much more I want to say about this game, but I truly do not feel like I can encapsulate the entire significance of it in this review. If you haven't, do yourself a favor and play The Silver Case and Flower Sun, and Rain. I have never played anything like them, and I think it's safe to say I will never play anything like them again.