Florence Is a Beautiful Reminder That It’s Okay to Move On

Florence is the rare game where the metaphor lies directly in the mechanics. Florence, an accountant in her mid 20s, is a lonely young woman, bored and going through the motions of her life, until she one day meets a musician named Krish. As the chapters progress, they move through the classic goalposts of a relationship, the ups and downs we’ve all experienced in the course of finding love. And as it comes to its heartbreaking and inevitable conclusion, it ends with a surprise: Florence moves on, and she is okay.

While many interactive stories seem to rely on clever formatting to almost justify their description as a videogame, Florence uses them to more to establish or reinforce the point of each scene or chapter, illustrating the passage of time, the inanity of a daily routine, or the difficulty of constructing a reply during a conversation. In one scene I took my time carefully selecting items in Florence’s apartment to go into storage and choosing which of Krish’s belongings to put on the shelves. Post-breakup, I had to then pack away all those things I’d so lovingly made room for into a box. Tears came to my eyes. They returned later, as Florence and Krish parted. Then again as she learned, finally, to let go and walk away. And finally again at the end, when she picks up the watercolors he once bought her, circling back to her childhood passion and finding redemption in a new skill and profession. The final shot, of Florence smiling at an old photo of her days with Krish, hints that she now looks on those days with fondness, and appreciates the brief time for what it was.

It’s been an interesting time in my life to come across Florence. The five year anniversary of my first trip to GDC was just a few short weeks ago, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the fling I had all those years ago, which I wrote about, in my first-ever article for Paste, after playing Firewatch. I wound up booking the same hotel, with the same tiny room I’d brought the man I called F, the subject of that old article, back to in 2013. I spent hours in the same restaurant where we’d dined with Notch on tapas and beer. I walked past the sidewalk where I broke my phone and remembered the little pipe he’d bought me on Market. I thought a lot about how, at the end of the week, he asked if we could be together and then, 24 hours later, changed his mind. In general, it was a trip haunted by what never was but could have been.