For this week’s critical play, I’ve played Florence on my Mac. Florence was developed by the Australian studio Mountains and published by Annapurna Interactive, released on February 2018. The game is currently available on iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, macOS, and Windows. The game is intended for audiences of all ages, and especially for non-gamers as well.
Florence offers an unconventional gameplay experience built almost entirely around minigame-style puzzles. Players follow Florence Yeoh, a 25-year-old woman stuck in a monotonous routine, as she meets Krish, a street cellist, falls in love, moves in with him, argues, breaks up, and finally rediscovers her abandoned passion for art. The story is told without spoken dialogue across six acts, each driven by bespoke mechanics tied to the emotional beat at hand. Players click through the rhythms of Florence’s life — brushing her teeth, scrolling social media, packing boxes — while conversations unfold as jigsaw puzzles whose pieces grow simpler as Florence and Krish grow closer. The art does quiet work alongside the mechanics: during arguments, the conversation pieces sharpen from rounded shapes into angular shards, visually transforming words into weapons. By the end of its 30- to 60-minute runtime, the game has guided the player through an entire relationship made of small, intimate gestures rather than grand events.
[Fig 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 – Florence makes mundane activities like brushing your teeth / scrolling through social media / conversing with your partner central elements of the game.]
Florence’s feminist achievements stem from a coordinated refusal of the masculine defaults that have long structured both video game narratives and gameplay. The first refusal is structural. The breakup with Krish is not the climax of Florence’s story but a gate she passes through on the way to her own self-actualization — Florence becomes an artist after moving on from Krish, not despite losing him. Unlike the conventional romance plot, which resolves through reconciliation or tragic separation, Florence simply refuses to make the relationship the point. This aligns with what Chess, drawing on Judith Roof and Teresa de Lauretis, calls the “never-ending narrative middle” — the feminist and queer refusal of climax-driven storytelling that Chess identifies as central to the “inherent maleness” of conventional narrative. The second refusal is mechanical. In MDA terms, Florence privileges narrative and sensation as its primary aesthetics of fun while largely setting aside challenge and competition — the aesthetics most “hardcore” gamers would expect. The result is a game whose central activities are brushing teeth, scrolling social media, and assembling jigsaw-puzzle conversations with a partner. By treating domestic and emotional labor as the central substance of the game, Florence does precisely what Chess states in the reading: it dignifies feminized activity as gameplay. This effectively work toward the same end Chess argues for throughout the chapter: broadening the medium beyond its masculine defaults to make room for new kinds of players.
[Figure 2. Florence grows into an artist after breaking up with Krish, not despite.]
However, these mechanics are also where Florence falls short. Chess argues that mechanics matter because they’re “agentic-training tools” for players – and she uses Diner Dash as an example, a game where the goal is to guide customers around a restaurant and serve them. Chess praises how Diner Dash makes mundane activities such as serving people and cleaning up after them feel satisfying and transforms them into opportunities of control. Florence does this as well – but unlike Diner Dash, you cannot fail in Florence. There is no fail state in this game – and the ending is the same no matter what the player does. In the end, Florence performs feminist mechanics rather than enacting them. It depicts a woman exercising agency in her life while asking nothing of the player playing her. If the player’s choices during the argument scene could actually push Florence and Krish toward staying together or breaking up — and if those outcomes felt earned by player skill in communication rather than chance — the mechanics would train something. The relationship would feel like a system the player can act within, not a cutscene. Only then would Florence be doing what Chess actually asks of feminist games: not just depicting women’s lives, but training players in the agency required to live them.
