For this critical play assignment, I played Florence, a narrative puzzle game created by Mountains and led by designer Ken Wong. The game is available on multiple platforms, including Steam, mobile devices, and Nintendo Switch; I played it on my laptop through Steam. Florence is primarily targeted toward players who enjoy visual storytelling about relationships and self-discovery (and an amazing musical score).
By transforming an ordinary story of a woman healing through relationships into an interactive experience, Florence embodies many feminist values described by Chess, though its limited player agency complicates its feminist potential.
In terms of content, the game is an interactive graphic novel about a young woman adjusting to her dull adult life, meeting a lover, growing apart from him, and ultimately rediscovering her passion for art as she heals through her relationships with her lover, her mother, and her inner child. I really appreciated that the game builds an entire narrative around something seemingly trivial: a young woman’s breakup and journey of self-discovery. So many video games focus on grand themes and traditionally masculine narratives about war, conquest, or saving civilization, while giving little attention to women’s vulnerable emotional experiences. As Chess argues, moral panics around video games helped construct gaming as a masculine space associated with violence, competition, and addiction. Florence subverts those assumptions by centering intimacy and personal growth as worthy, feminist subjects of play.
The game’s form is equally powerful. The music and visuals are absolutely moving; I cried multiple times throughout the chapters as I experienced Florence’s emotions (I wish I could embed the soundtrack in this post; this is the piece that put me to tears https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BulMVnxAh-o). One of the most striking visual techniques is the intentional use of the color. In Chapter 2, when we see Florence as a child, the colors are adjusted so that they look like a memory.
Another prominent example is the color bright yellow. In lecture, we discussed how having one color as a recurring motif can contribute to character building and visual storytelling, and Florence uses color exceptionally well. Florence’s adult life begins almost devoid of color, making yellow stand out as a symbol of joy and childhood wonder. It appears prominently when she meets Krish: the musical notes that draw her toward him and the lemons from their first collision are all shades of bright yellow.
The meaning of this color evolves alongside the relationship. As Florence and Krish settle into routine, his bright yellow clothing becomes duller and less vibrant. When they begin growing apart and Florence experiences heartbreak, yellow nearly disappears from the frame entirely. However, as she reconnects with her passion for art, the color returns alongside a wider spectrum of colors. The game ends with Florence standing hopefully before her window, surrounded not by the dull tones of her old life or the singular brightness of romantic love, but by a rich palette created through her own artistic expression. Through color alone, the game tells a story about a woman rediscovering herself through relationships while ultimately finding fulfillment within herself (and her room literally fills up).
Beyond color, I also appreciated how the game’s visual design feels distinctly anti-male gaze. The male gaze, a concept developed by film theorist Laura Mulvey, describes how women are often portrayed as objects to be looked at and consumed, rather than as subjects with their own interiority. An anti-male-gaze game, in my view, creates the feeling of being “in feeling”—living IN a body rather than looking AT a body. Florence herself is never exaggerated or sexualized like the stereotypical female video game character with impossibly big breasts and booties, and revealing, impractical battle armor. Instead, she looks like an ordinary person who has a little tummy and can look messy after a breakup. This made her feel incredibly relatable, and her body is an instrument to live through emotions rather than an ornament for male gamers to lust after. More importantly, the game places us inside her emotional experience.
The game’s mechanics amplify the emotional storytelling. Much of the gameplay consists of short puzzles, such as matching numbers at work or assembling speech bubbles during conversations. What I find particularly clever is how these mechanics change depending on Florence’s emotional state. During arguments, the speech bubbles become jagged, red, and difficult to put together. During flirtatious conversations, they are smoother and easier to put together, reflecting the ease with which words come when attraction and tipsiness do their jobs. Likewise, when Florence feels disconnected from herself at work, players must manually complete repetitive matching tasks. When she is swept up in the excitement of new love, those same number matching tasks complete themselves. I think this is also an excellent combination of game loop and arcs: the small, repetitive, puzzle-solving loops all builds toward the larger chapter arcs and storytelling, which taught me mechanics and kept me engaged in the relationship’s direction. Because the mechanics shift alongside Florence’s emotional life, they create the dynamic where players begin anticipating changes in gameplay as reflections of changes in her mental state. This all produce the aesthetics of an immersive feminist narrative.
^ evolving dialogue boxes: from the shy, flustered, and carefully constructed puzzles to the easier, more natural ones and they found their attraction at a bar; the spiky angry dialogue boxes
^ Helping Florence count money through her office job, during her romance, and as she becomes a painter
I also appreciate the game’s commitment to visual storytelling. Unlike similar narrative games such as Gone Home, Florence rarely relies on written text. Instead, it communicates meaning through color, music, animation, and interaction. Rather than feeling like I am reading large blocks of text, I feel like I am experiencing a story through the unique possibilities of the game medium, through show-not-tell. For this reason, I think Florence is an excellent example of what Chess describes as “feminist leisure.”
One critique I have is that Florence’s relationship with her mother feels underdeveloped. Although her mother appears to play a significant role in helping Florence recover after the breakup, the game never fully explores that relationship. This matriarchal relationship was actually one of the most relatable aspects of the story for me, yet it often feels sidelined in favor of the romantic plot. As a result, Florence’s mother is reduced somewhat to the stereotype of an annoying Asian mother constantly pressuring her daughter to find a man. A deeper exploration of their relationship could have strengthened the game’s feminist themes by emphasizing the importance of intergenerational female relationships and care networks.
The ethical issue I have with the game concerns player agency. Chess discusses how games can help players develop a sense of agency and control, particularly for women who may feel disempowered by patriarchal structures in everyday life. However, although the narrative is about Florence gaining agency over her life, I rarely felt that I had agency as a player. Most of the gameplay involves completing predetermined puzzles and following a fixed sequence of events. The only moments where I genuinely felt in control were assembling the butterfly artwork and deciding what to place in the moving boxes after the breakup: I don’t get a say in Florence’s major life decisions. This raises an interesting question about the game’s feminist promise: does it give Florence agency, or does it give the player feminist agency? While Florence ultimately makes meaningful choices for herself, the player largely acts as a passive observer guiding her through a predetermined destiny. I found myself wondering whether women who turn to games seeking a sense of control over their lives would actually feel empowered by Florence, or whether they would simply watch Florence exercise agency from behind a glass window. To strengthen the game’s feminist potential, I would have liked more opportunities to influence conversations with Krish and Florence’s mother, make meaningful relationship decisions, or shape Florence’s personal growth.
