SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Hand-drawn, carefully crafted and inventive with interactivity, Florence effortlessly captures all the ups and downs of being in love.
It’s been several hours since I finished Florence, and I’m still mulling it over. Thinking back, I can remember a time when I used to play games like Pokémon Go and Plants vs Zombies on my phone. I no longer play games that way, and more often than not, “true” gamers are regarded as players who restrict themselves to PC (Mac gaming is sneered at too) and traditional consoles. Florence and its wonderful snapshots of first love make a compelling argument for a re-thinking of the humble phone as a platform for gaming. It never shies away from the fact that it is a game designed for mobile; in fact, it embraces and rejoices in it while remaining as emotionally charged and breath-taking as some of our best console experiences.
Florence follows the daily routine of 25-year-old Florence Yeoh and the budding relationship that forms between her and Krish, a street performer who plays cello in the park. It takes the form of an interactive novel, relying on the player to complete simple minigames to progress the story from one chapter to the next.
Lasting about half an hour, it’s short, sweet and well-executed. The short length of Florence is one of its strengths, and the story is well-told, steering clear of many of the clichés that populate many romantic films and books. It also captures concepts not often depicted in video gaming: immigrant culture, cross-cultural romance and the struggle of an artist at a 9-to-5 job endlessly crunching numbers. In essence, it’s a real-life experience. Florence strives to be honest and winds up being remarkably true to life.
Over the course of half an hour, it presents the player with vignettes, snapshots of moments in Florence’s life and in her relationship with Krish as it develops from casual dating to serious commitment. The player has no control over the direction of its linear story but is still given the opportunity to make choices. One particular snapshot gave me the opportunity to choose between different objects. My choice didn’t affect the game, but it had an emotional impact simply because I was allowed to give Florence a personal touch. It transformed those snapshots of first love into something much more personal.
Florence also embraces its roots in the mobile genre. Rather than having an awkward controller UI pasted on top of everything, you play Florence by swiping, tapping and dragging. It’s quirky and inventive with its minigames. You might help Florence brush her teeth by dragging left and right, set her alarm clock to snooze with a tap, or rub the screen in order to shake a Polaroid picture. Despite being a novel, the game relies on very little dialogue and turns her conversations with Krish into a minigame involving piecing together speech bubble-shaped puzzles. Early on, you might have a six-piece puzzle, but as Florence and Krish grow more comfortable with one another, you’ll get simpler three-piece puzzles instead. There’s also a sequence where you have to do nothing to progress. Being told to do nothing had great effect. The way it paradoxically transforms inaction into something active is clever subversion of the one constant impulse in video-gaming: to be doing something.
Florence’s art design makes the whole game look like an artist’s sketchbook. It’s drawn in hard pencil lines and filled in with simple shades of colour. Scenes where Florence is at the office or commuting are shaded in cold blue or rendered in minimalist black and white, and Krish’s arrival in her life coincides with vibrant, bright colours: sunflower yellow and powder blue. The soundtrack is also stirring. Piano for Florence and cello for Krish replace conversation, adding remarkable depth to the wide array of emotions depicted in the game’s snapshots.
Those snapshots are put together into a moving, affecting interactive experience. What Florence offers are snapshots of life, of two artists struggling to be true to themselves in a world that’s largely indifferent to their life’s work, and the story of them finding each other and falling in love. I found the ending to be a disappointment, but the journey to it is well worth your time and money. Often people have a preconceived notion of mobile gaming, of an endless number of ten-second ads and time-saving microtransactions. Florence is a challenge to that notion, and proof that perhaps the medium can, on occasion, evolve beyond.
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