I pre-order every Grasshopper manufacturing game, so I was glad to see Flower, Sun and Rain is coming stateside on May 5.

It sounds like Groundhog Day meets Hotel Dusk meets Lost in Blue with the insanity effects of Eternal Darkness, which sounds like utter garbage to be avoided at all costs, but I'm still hopeful.

Wiki: Sumio Mondo is a "searcher" who makes a living looking for people's lost things. He arrives on the resort island of Lospass and takes a room at the F.S.R. hotel after being tasked with detecting and defusing a time bomb, planted on a plane which is soon to leave the island's only airport.

On the way to the airport however, Sumio encounters other hotel guests and island residents requesting his help with various problems, including searching for missing items. While Sumio is distracted by them, the airplane with the bomb on board takes off and explodes, crashing into the island.

Next morning, however, Sumio awakens in his hotel room and discovers that something strange has happened. He has not even headed to the airport yet and the airplane explosion and crash have not happened yet, either. Sumio attempts to head to the airport to prevent the explosion. Again, however, other people who need his help appear, distracting him long enough to lead to a repeat of the previous days explosion, and Sumio once again awakens in his hotel room before any of the days events have taken place. As the same fateful day repeats itself over and over, Sumio finds the hotel becoming more and more twisted, reflecting the fact that he is slowly losing his mind from the repetition.

EDGE: (makes it sound even worse) As a script, Flower, Sun And Rain is, for at least two thirds, hugely witty and effortlessly mad, eliciting enough regular laughs to cover for the game’s otherwise painfully tedious forms of interaction. But as any notional gesture towards a cogent plot unravels, the game gives you less and less incentive to continue – and in fact mocks you for doing so. Characters frequently launch postmodern assaults on the fourth wall, pointing out the game’s clunky mechanics, audiovisual failings and the near-negligible level of challenge from the puzzles – all of which are limited to a numerical input and rarely derived from an act of logic. http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/review-flower-sun-and-rain

Now, I can see why someone may criticize the graphics based on this shot, but seriously, if you look at it as being a vertical scrolling shooter it is actually very cool looking.  And, the large square pixels that make up the grass are like a comment on pixels themselves, as though it's saying "We are not grass -- we are pixels!"