It was a quiet Saturday morning. Despite my plans to sleep in late, I woke up at 9 a.m. and decided to get up and take a morning shower. I rolled out of bed as gently as I could so as not to wake up my girlfriend. She looked so peaceful, so I took care to tiptoe out of our bedroom and let her rest. When I snuck back into the bedroom 30 minutes later, she was awake and perturbed.
“It woke me up by saying ‘They say the ocean tastes like tears,’” she said, motioning towards the orange menace on our nightstand.
This is what the future holds for you if you let the dreaded Talking Flower into your home. Nintendo’s new creation takes Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s cheery character and turns it into a wise-cracking toy that quips at you throughout the day. It’s a lifestyle product in the same vein as the Alarmo alarm clock, meant to add a little more color and — dare I say — wonder to kids’ everyday lives outside their Switch screens. That’s a well-meaning idea… in theory. But in practice, the Talking Flower is a jump scare machine built to terrorize your peace. You must approach it as you would an enemy.
My domestic battle with the plastic pest began one week ago. I returned home from a long week of work at the Game Developers Conference to find that a small package had arrived while I was gone. I knew it was the Talking Flower. My girlfriend did not — because I opted not to tell her that I would be introducing it into our household ahead of time. We’ve been dating long enough that she’s used to me bringing products like the Alarmo into our apartment, but the key to a good relationship is preserving some mystery. I only gave her a hint that something was coming two months earlier, noting that “something is going to happen to our house in a few months.” She has been terrified ever since.
I let her handle unboxing duties to finally pay off that threat/promise. As soon as she pulled the Talking Flower out, her jaw dropped about as far as Ghostface’s. I don’t know how to describe her expression. It was somewhere at the intersection of disbelief, ironic joy, and legitimate terror. She wordlessly turned the packaging over in her hands like Brad Pitt in Seven. After a few moments, she finally composed herself enough to read the features printed on the side. One caught her eye immediately.
“Talking Flower will also announce the hour… but is it always accurate?” she read. “What does that mean!?”
That’s a great question that I still don’t have an answer to. But what I can tell you is what this thing actually does. The Talking Flower is a cross between a clock and a cutesy noisemaker. When you set it up, you choose one of the 11 languages you want it to speak in, set the time, and input your wake-up and bedtimes so it won’t scream at you in the dead of night. It doesn’t have a digital screen; rather, it announces the time every hour on the hour. It’s kind of like Big Ben, but if you replaced its proud BONGS with peppy one-liners. Nintendo made a grandfather clock evil.
In between hours, Talking Flower will break your household’s silence by tossing out a quip or two at random intervals. You can press a button on it to make it speak at any time, if you enjoy pain, or you can activate a mute mode to shut it up for a bit so it doesn’t interrupt you when you’re trying to have a serious moment. There’s a music mode that lets you hear a brief tune from Super Mario Bros. Wonder, too. That’s all there is to it. Talking Flower doesn’t have a practical function like the Alarmo; it’s just there to bug you until you can’t take it anymore. (Though the usage manual issues a very stern warning about hurting the guy: “Do not drop, hit, or otherwise abuse Talking Flower.”)
I refused to be defeated by the pipsqueak, so my girlfriend and I decided to engage it in a week-long test of willpower. The terms of battle were thus:
- We would leave it on throughout the day
- It would sleep next to our bed at night
- We could not hide it when company came over.
Such began a blinking contest I was sure we would win. What I forgot to account for is that the Talking Flower never closes its abyss-like eyes. We lost the war immediately the first time it chirped up: It scared the living piss out of us.
This is when I finally knew that the devil was real.
What the packaging for Talking Flower doesn’t tell you is that it’s Satan’s greatest jump scare machine. The unpredictable nature of its quip intervals means that you’re just never expecting it to pipe up. Even more unnerving is that every time it announces the hour, it begins by sucking in a huge digital breath. It sounds like the rapture is beginning. The first day I had it, I placed it next to me at my desk. After a few hours, I had to move it into the living room because it kept making me jolt in my rickety office chair.
What we quickly learned is that the Talking Flower has a cruel sense of humor. Anytime I was locked in to writing up an interview at GDC, it would suggest that I focus, which in turn broke my focus. It routinely would ask us if we ate lunch yet at 2 p.m. like a therapy influencer who is always telling their followers to drink water. (What’s worse is that it was always right to nag me, because I had not in fact eaten lunch yet any time it asked.) One time my girlfriend was telling me a long anecdote and the flower yawned midway through it. Though Talking Flower has no way of responding to anything you do, I began to believe that it possessed a dark sentience, like Chucky. Either way, I am confident it does not possess a soul.
Refusing to let it win, I upped the stakes further. On Sunday, we were invited over to a friend’s house to marathon the Saw movies. That seemed like a perfect environment for Talking Flower, the only thing on Earth that loves torture more than Jigsaw. I packed it in a tote bag and took it on the train, letting it occasionally let out a muffled quip and praying no one next to me became suspicious that I was smuggling a very small child to Bushwick. Upon getting to my friends’ place, I placed Talking Flower on the living room coffee table and embarrassingly explained that it would be joining us.
Around 90 minutes later, right during the first movie’s shocking end twist, the Talking Flower perked up to say, “Sure is peaceful!” This is when I finally knew that the devil was real.
We took a Lyft home and just prayed that it wouldn’t talk too much. No chance. It sneezed, and our driver very politely ignored it. We topped off that mortifying day by hosting eight people on Oscars night (to watch On Cinema at the Cinema’s Oscars special, not the show itself). Every time a new person arrived, I had to explain the Talking Flower’s deal again. It’s times like those that make you question your whole career.
What makes Talking Flower a particularly tough hang is that it doesn’t actually have all that much to say. We began hearing repeated lines two days into the experiment. By the third day, we had seemingly heard every single one of its canned voice lines. I began to dread every time I’d have to hear “Ta-da! Ta-da, the sequel!” once again. What’s particularly weird is that very few of the things it says are really jokes at all. It mostly just shouts out vague comments about what a nice day it is, or tells you that it’s getting sleepy. It also hardly mentions the Mario universe at all aside from one voice line about how it is safe from Bowser here. There’s a real missed opportunity here to load the thing up with actual lines from Super Mario Bros. Wonder or with Easter egg secrets that make you want to keep it on longer. (One of the few legitimate chuckles it got out of me came when I set its language to Italian for a few hours. When I set it back to English, it quipped in Italian for a moment before correcting itself.)
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past week trying to figure out exactly what Talking Flower is meant to be. It’s not a very good clock, nor is it a good comedian. I’m not sure how much joy kids will get out of hearing a hunk of plastic say “Feeling great!” every few hours. The most joy my girlfriend and I got out of Talking Flower simply came from annoying each other with it in a novel new way. One day, she hid it in a cabinet. I could not figure out where it was hiding and spent a good 10 minutes ripping the house apart in search of its location. I will get my revenge on her for that.
So what’s the point of it? The conclusion I eventually settled on is that it’s Nintendo’s version of a gag gift. Have you ever done a white elephant gift exchange during the holidays? There always has to be one bum present in there that’s meant to be unboxed right there so the whole family can laugh at it, before the person who received it puts it in the attic for the rest of their natural life.
Once that thought came into my mind, a childhood memory came flooding back to me. When I was a kid, someone gave my grandfather a Big Mouth Billy Bass for Christmas. It was a plastic fish that hung on the wall and would break out into song if you walked by its motion sensor. I loved it dearly growing up. Anytime I went to my grandparents’ house, I would trigger it and listen to the same two songs again and again. When things were quiet, I’d activate it to annoy everyone and get a laugh out of the room. I can see that easily amused kid in me again when I’m hanging out with Talking Flower. That’s the most sincere sales pitch for the toy I can muster: Every kid deserves that one annoying toy that makes them smile.
As I reflected on that, I remembered another Big Mouth Billy Bass memory. Near the end of his life, my grandfather was hospitalized with an illness. I wanted to cheer him up, so I brought the fish to the hospital. It brought our family so much joy over the years and I assumed he would be thrilled to have his old pal with him. I got to his room and proudly revealed it, only to be met with a look of horror.
“Oh no, why’d you bring that goddamn thing here!?” he shouted. I was confused at the time. After a week with Talking Flower, I finally understand where he was coming from.
