PGC London 19: The Flute is a game about discovering some of the best music in the world
Quite often modern life is painfully dumb. Our escape from the idiocy around us, from the gnawing stupidity and the remnants of our self respect, cultural identities, and sense of community, can sometimes feel like it's impossible. Especially if we look to digital entertainment for those brief respites from the dulling chaos of just trying to stay alive. Not so with The Flute.
Now I don't want you to think that I'm trying to draw a distinction between low and high culture here, because that couldn't be farther from the truth. I'm saying that some games are about watching numbers go up, and some are about gaining an appreciation of some of the most beautiful music ever created. The Flute, thankfully, is the latter.
The game is a stylised platformer that's built around the story of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. It sees you leaping through platforming levels, avoiding monsters, and trying to rescue a princess. All set to a specially created score that walks players through sections of the famous piece of classical music.
Since this is a platformer, the controls are key. Here they work really rather well. You're swiping to move and jump, and tapping to fire arrows if you've got any to use. You can also tap in certain places to pull switches and manipulate the world in other ways. Everything is easy to understand, and it allows the heart of the game the space to beat.
That heart is the music, or more specifically how that music intertwines with the mechanics of the experience. Where some games that beg you to play with headphones can be ignored, that simply isn't the case here. It's not that the music is better, but that it's such an integral part of what's happening in The Flute that missing it would be missing the point.
Part of any piece of narrative's existence has to concern itself with why it exists - what is it trying to say? The Flute is trying to say that there's a whole world of music that we've been told is highbrow and worthy and should be considered as untouchable by the so-called lower art forms.
But that, as everyone knows, is utter nonsense. The Flute is trying to open up the works of some of the world's greatest composers to a brand new audience in ways that they can understand, and you can bet your last potato chip that we're excited about that.
