Florence
The game I explore this week was Florence, developed by Mountains and published by Annapurna Interactive. Florence is a charming, short, narrative-driven puzzle game available on iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch. Personally, I played on mobile as it was the most accessible to me, and I’m glad I did! I feel as if the direct connection between my finger and the correlated action in the world of Florence added a small level of immersion to an already emotionally resonant story. The game targets casual players who are drawn to emotionally intimate storytelling more than traditional gameplay, including those who may not typically consider themselves gamers. With soft visuals, a short run time (about 30 minutes), and entirely touch-based interaction, the game is purposefully accessible for many.
Some games tell stories through cutscenes. Florence tells its story through puzzles. In Florence, the puzzle mechanics are not designed to challenge the player intellectually, but to evolve alongside the protagonist’s emotional state, transforming simple interactions into a powerful storytelling device that makes players feel the narrative through their actions via puzzles. By aligning interaction with emotion, the game makes you feel the story rather than just follow it.
The mechanics adapt to the protagonist’s emotional state: they shift, soften, and fracture depending on what Florence is going through. It’s this symbolic evolution of the puzzles that makes the embedded narrative in Florence so impactful. The designer’s intentional choices makes you progress, feel, and reflect on the story.
From Routine to Relationship
In the opening scenes, the puzzles are intentionally mundane (brushing teeth, turning off alarms, scrolling through social media). You swipe, tap, and drag in repetitive, predictable ways. These mechanics reinforce Florence’s internal stagnation. They aren’t difficult, but they are emotionally hollow, which is the point of the designer’s intention. Their choices do create the intended impact very powerfully. The simplicity and monotony of the early puzzles mirror Florence’s daily routine and emotional disengagement. By making the player go through these dull, mechanical motions, the game doesn’t just show her stagnation, it makes you feel it (and, honestly, reflect on your own repetitive, mundane habits). The lack of challenge isn’t a design flaw; it’s a narrative device. And it works!
When Florence meets Krish, the puzzle language changes. One of the most memorable scenes is their first conversation. The player assembles speech bubbles from puzzle pieces. At first, the shapes are awkward and jagged, requiring some effort to fit together. But as the characters grow closer, the shapes become simpler and faster to complete. The mechanic subtly communicates what the dialogue doesn’t: connection is forming. This progression validates what Designing the Puzzle outlines as a strong embedded puzzle, one that evolves with the story and reveals something new through interaction.
The designer’s choice absolutely had the intended impact as the puzzle mechanic resonates because it reflects something deeply human. The puzzles are simple and repetitive by design, which makes the subtle shifts in shape and difficulty all the more noticeable to the player. It’s a parallel many can relate to: we’ve all experienced moments when conversation felt awkward and effortful, and others when words flowed with ease. It made me reflect on my own interactions- when speaking feels clunky versus when it just clicks. With the people I’m closest to, the puzzle pieces would fall into place effortlessly, just like they do for Florence and Krish. That’s how I know their connection is real, loving, and comfortable.
Friction as Symbol
Later in the game, these same speech bubble puzzles return, but now, in the middle of arguments. The pieces are harder to control, even changing shape as you move them. Smooth edges become sharp and harder to piece together. This mechanic doesn’t just represent conflict, it feels like conflict. The frustration isn’t about difficulty in the traditional sense, but about emotional dissonance.
The color scheme also changes. In the early years of the relationship, the colors are more pastel and warm. It mimics the feeling of rose-colored glasses in the honeymoon stage. However, at the point where our characters have their first, and then repeated, arguments, the background is more muted and the colors harsher in tone. They honeymoon stage has passed, and multiple conflicts that come with reality begin to affect their relationship. At their breaking point, the colors are a very harshly saturated red, the sharpest they’ve been. The puzzle’s objective also changes- there’s no turn-taking in speech patterns, you’re trying to “speak” as many bubbles faster than he can. I found my adrenaline building; I wanted to win the argument! You don’t know what they’re saying, but after the journey you went on their relationship, your mind starts to fill in the blanks for them (e.g., “Why do you get to chase your dream of being a musician while I’m stuck in an office?”). Whatever they’re saying, you know their words are filled with venom.
At the end, there a moment of gray where Florence sits alone, which works as a moment of pause and reflection. Who am I to insult Krish? Should I apologize? Should he apologize? How did this game make me internalize an argument between animated characters? I immediately went into self-reflection mode of past arguments from my relationships. It’s especially here where you realize how Florence is an amazing blend of gameplay, theme and visual narrative. The aftermath of this argument is no longer as passionate, life becomes gray and blue, and you know that once their puzzles don’t fit together, the relationship is over.
This is where the game excels: by using simple inputs to mirror complex experiences. What is a Puzzle? argues that puzzles are powerful when they create perceptual shifts. In Florence, the shift isn’t visual. It’s emotional! You aren’t learning a new rule set; you’re reinterpreting the same mechanic through a changed emotional lens. This is how the game tells you, without words, that things are falling apart.
Repetition with Change
One of the most thoughtful design choices is how the game reuses mechanics in different emotional contexts. Near the end, when Florence starts rebuilding her life post-breakup, you return to earlier forms of interaction: dragging, matching, tapping. But they don’t feel the same. Now, they’re gentle. Purposeful. When Florence paints or organizes her space, the mechanics resemble the beginning, but they’re transformed by what you’ve been through, emphasizing the growth the led from the relationship between Krish and Florence. She’s back we’re she started, but not really- she’s grown in noticeable ways.
The game could’ve added entirely new mechanics here, but it doesn’t need to. The repetition with emotional context is the change. That’s a design philosophy echoed in Designing the Puzzle: effective puzzles don’t exist outside the story, they are the story. And by limiting its toolset, Florence amplifies its emotional resonance.
Ethical Reflection: Whose Experience Is This?
While Florence excels at conveying emotional nuance, its universal framing can obscure whose story is actually being told. The game centers a heteronormative, middle-class romance with culturally familiar beats: meet-cute, cohabitation, breakup, rediscovery through art. For some players, this arc will feel deeply personal. For others, myself included, it can feel distantly aestheticized.
An example of this is in Florence’s story, a mutli-year relationship was severed within 2 chapters. To “let go,” the players need to watch Florence walk away from the ghost of her relationship for ~20 seconds. If you tap on the screen, Krish’s memory walks closer to Florence. It isn’t until you’ve walked away completely (no interaction with the screen) that you’ve completed this puzzle. The designer’s intention here seems clear: to represent emotional release as an act of intentional non-action- a quiet, internal choice to move forward. In the following chapters, Florence’s growth and encouragement of her passion through Krish’s gifts lead her to rediscover her love of art, push herself to sell online, and eventually live her dream as a successful artist. It’s a beautiful story about how some people enter our lives, shape who we become, and eventually move on. It’s a reminder we can still carry gratitude for them despite going separate ways.
Still, this is one moment where I think the game falls a bit short. Getting over a relationship is rarely as simple as choosing to walk away; it’s not a clean, one-step puzzle. Emotional recovery is often nonlinear, full of regressions, second-guessing, and unresolved feelings. Compressing this complexity into a single 30-second interaction risks oversimplifying the messy, drawn-out process of healing. While the mechanic is elegant in concept, it glosses over the emotional labor involved in truly letting go. In doing so, the game misses an opportunity to more honestly reflect the uneven terrain of loss and recovery, in the worst case implying that if you continue to be affected by the past, it’s your fault for not choosing to let go.
To account for this, I believe the mechanics of this puzzle could be flipped. Right now, it’s easier to let go (simply by doing nothing) than it is to hold on (which requires active tapping). But I think it’s often the opposite in reality- ruminating is passive, even automatic, while healing takes intention, repetition, and emotional effort. This moment might be more resonant if the player had to work to walk away: perhaps holding a drag gesture steady through resistance, navigating a path that resets with hesitation, or making choices that reflect the difficulty of moving forward. By making letting go harder than staying stuck, the puzzle could better reflect what recovery actually feels like- slow, effortful, and deeply human.
Similarly, Florence’s quick progression into artistic success once she walks away may unintentionally send the message that emotional closure (by your choice) is all that stands between a person and fulfillment. This risks reducing self-actualization to a matter of willpower, implying that those who aren’t thriving simply haven’t chosen to let go of past trauma. In reality, personal development often unfold slowly, shaped by privilege, opportunity, mental health, and support networks. By framing success as a direct outcome of chosen internal change alone, the game risks reinforcing a narrative of individual responsibility that may not reflect everyone’s reality.
To account for this, the story could have allowed Krish’s memory to sometimes remain present throughout Florence’s creative journey, not as a barrier, but as a quiet echo that gradually fades. This would send a more nuanced message: that healing doesn’t need to be complete before progress can begin, and that we can still (and that it’s okay to) carry emotional traces of past relationships while moving toward who we’re becoming.
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All-in-all
Florence doesn’t use puzzles to create challenge; it uses them to create connection. Each mechanic evolves with Florence’s emotional arc, turning everyday interactions into symbolic acts of storytelling. The game succeeds not because its puzzles are hard, but because they’re honest. By making the act of solving feel like the act of understanding, Florence shows that the most effective narrative-driven puzzles don’t just ask us to think- they ask us to feel.
