Florence is a singleplayer point-and-click game developed by Mountains and published by Annapurna Interactive, available on Steam. It is a game designed to be accessible to players of any experience level that enjoy slice-of-life games and unfolding narratives. In Florence, players begin by experiencing a day in her life, drowning in mundane routine, until she is drawn to a cello player, Krish. As the player clicks and swipes, they watch the relationship of Florence and Krish evolve, as well as Florence herself. In “Play like a Feminist,” Shira Chess puts forth a simple framework for critiquing video games from a feminist lens, which we will now apply here. Florence creates an inclusive experience for players of all skill levels and identities while constructing a complex story that subverts expectations and takes an emotional hold on the player; though it does not meaningfully train a player in agency, its unique design and playing style promote reflection in a safe environment.
Chess argues, above all else, that play is necessary, particularly for women. More than being a necessary part of every person’s life, play is political, “play is an issue of equality” (17). Encouraging play for women, she argues, is integral to both the feminist and gaming communities, and to do so we must create and play games like feminists. We can first think of this in terms of inclusivity. Florence’s mechanics require little-to-no prior gaming experience: the game mostly involves clicking, scrolling, and simple puzzle solving, with most actions made explicit through visual cues. In this photo, the player simply moves objects into place.
From an MDA perspective, these accessible mechanics, along with the minimization of failure states, produce dynamics centered on exploration and emotional engagement rather than mastery or competition. Rather than optimizing points or kills, the objective is to learn about the characters and watch their relationship evolve, evoking aesthetics of discovery and narrative. This design lowers barriers for players who may not identify as “gamers,” supporting Chess’s argument that play should be accessible to everyone, and expanding what a game can be.
Another primary axis of Chess’s framework is the inclusion of a story, particularly one that subverts the expectations a player has gleaned from a patriarchal society. To put it simply, “a good feminist game needs to tell a good feminist story” (85). Through environmental storytelling and symbolic mechanics, Florence tells the story of a young woman experiencing life within and outside of a relationship, finding purpose once she has moved on. We see Florence living an uninspired life until she is pulled through the air toward a cellist, Krish. With him, life becomes brighter.
We watch their relationship grow and Krish become the light of her life.
We help them move in together, a minigame that shows how their relationship asks each participant to give up pieces of their lives to let the other in.
We watch the two support each other’s passions (Florence literally pushes Krish to apply to a music academy) though Krish engages in his far more than Florence: her artwork revolves around him, while his playing is his own.
Eventually, we watch the two drift apart and the color again floods out of the game.
However, as Florence moves on, she rediscovers her passion for artwork. She redesigns her life, away from the mundane accountant job, to be fulfilling and colorful again, and she does so with her own agency.
The story being told here is one that is subversive to the expectations of the player. Florence does not, as in so many stories, find her purpose through her relationship but instead outside of it. The game design tells this story specifically through its puzzle mechanics. For example, the conversation bubbles between Krish and Florence are employed through small puzzles that get easier to solve as they know each other better.
When they fight, the puzzles have jagged edges and a speed component that creates stressful aesthetics.
When the two start to drift away from each other, the player is asked to solve a puzzle of the two where the pieces are literally floating away from each other. This minigame was hard to finish, mirroring the experience of watching the relationship dissolve. By making the player feel the very emotions the characters experience, Florence creates empathy in the exact sense Chess argues for when she says that “a feminist video game story has particular potential for empathy building” (86).
There is one way in which Florence falls short in the framework Chess describes. In her book, Chess promotes videogames as “agentic-training tools” that can demonstrate to “those who are marginalized how to act” (90). Agency is a necessary pillar of feminism, and the agency in video games can motivate players. However, due to the simplicity of its gameplay, Florence offers only the idea of choice without its weight; nothing a player does alters the story. Increasing agency could deeply add to the player experience, by allowing the player to impact Florence’s life post-breakup or during conflict. Florence’s genre relatives show what its refusal of agency costs. Life is Strange is also a narrative coming-of-age centered on a young woman, but it is built around consequential choice: its rewind mechanic lets players test, regret, and remake decisions. That dynamic is exactly the “agentic training” Chess calls for (90): the player doesn’t just watch a young woman make hard choices, she practices them. Florence, by contrast, hands us a finished arc. What Florence sacrifices in choice it reclaims in mechanical intimacy. Unlike Gris or Monument Valley (comparably minimalist, art-forward games) Florence fuses puzzle and feeling. That fusion is Florence’s distinctive contribution to the genre, and why it builds empathy even while withholding agency.
