Worlds without Words: Florence and the Routines of Life
Florence, the 2018 game designed by Australian developer Mountains, is essentially a visual novel. It tells a story through limited interactions that can be played on mobile, PC, or the Nintendo Switch, drawing attention to its beautiful art and music in a half-hour experience suited for players who want a short but sweet narrative.
What makes Florence stand out from most other visual novels and interactive fiction games is its complete lack of dialogue. For a game that is so deeply about its narrative, there is only one interaction where you as the player engage in dialogue that you can read (Fig. 1). Instead, Florence tells its story through the routines of daily life, inviting the player to care about Florence’s world through the ways their own routines mirror Florence’s. Florence’s world could be any one of ours, and that is why we care.
Florence is deeply tied with the routines that make up our lives and the ways that they shift over time. Right away, your first interaction is to snooze Florence’s alarm clock (Fig. 2). This introduction serves many purposes effectively. First, it introduces you to the scope of the mechanics. You quickly learn that you are given very few affordances in your actions, and must always find an interactable routine. Second, it immerses you into the action of the story, building up the society of the world as one that is likely modern and similarly structured to our’s with early rising standards for work. Thirdly and most importantly, it gets you to care about Florence as you relate to her desire to snooze her morning alarm. This immediately invites the player to invest in Florence through this relatability where her character reflects the real players deciding to try the game, providing the foundation for the rest of the story even without words.
In no mechanic is this more true than in that of the puzzles of dialogue in Florence. The bulk of the game’s narrative is around Florence meeting a musician named Krish, and how their love story progresses. When Krish and Florence have conversations, text bubbles appear as jigsaw puzzle pieces (Fig. 3). While these puzzles are first difficult, they become easier as the characters get to know each other better. Later, they become jagged and complex with arguments. Without words ever appearing, it is a fascinating method of absence to have the player fill in what these potential conversations might be through their own similar routines, all while still promoting a player’s care for the world and Florence’s story because it could reflect any of our own. The simple jigsaw puzzle mechanic leads to a dynamic of feeling puzzles getting easier or harder that leads to an aesthetic intuition about the narrative itself.
Compared to other games that center narrative as a key point, these “dialogue” mechanics reveal how Florence is unique because of the way it approaches its strategy of storytelling. In games like What Remains of Edith Finch? or Monument Valley, the story is “unlocked” and told through varying puzzles which contribute to the fun. In other interactive fiction text-based games like Doki Doki Literature Club or Twine-made games, the story is told through clicking through words, and the fun comes in uncovering information with new text. Amidst these, Florence stands out since it clearly tells a story without engaging complex puzzles or words. It tells its story through the act of immersion in the routines of Florence’s life, and seeing how the environment of her life changes around her over time.
However, in an ultimately hopeful game about finding meaning in your life amidst routines, I have ethical concerns about how easily Florence resolves its narrative. In this well-built out world where most of the time has been spent fleshing out Florence and Krish’s relationship, the last few minutes of the game were jarring. A sudden speed in picking up an old paint palette and fast-forwarding to find happiness feels too easy. In doing this, Florence suggests that living a happy life can just be achieved through doing what you love, without pushing for a more critical judgement on happiness. It leads to an interesting ethical question as a designer: would you rather a narrative have a happy ending that feels less realistic, or a bittersweet ending that actually captures the complexities of reality?
The game currently displays a sentiment of “If you just work hard at what you love, everything will be okay.” On the surface, it can be comforting to see that perspective, but in the long run it can contribute to further anxieties in players who might feel that their lives are going wrong if they aren’t finding happiness through passions as easily as Florence did, or if they don’t have the means to do so in the first place (Fig. 4). To address this issue of impact, I would have liked to see more exploration of Florence’s own personal development after her break up. Does she make new friends, establish new routines of calling her mom, or find other, realistic ways of improving her happiness? There are so many routines that we have to develop to become truly happy, and I would have liked to see more of that process in Florence.
Ultimately, Florence draws the player into its story without any words at all. Instead, it gets people to care because of the nature of the routines that it encapsulates, and the way that most players will be able to see parts of their own routines in Florence’s. At the end of the day, our lives are all built-up through thousands of routines. Florence encourages us to look at those routines and how they change over time, hopefully finding happiness in our own stories with time.
