Review of Florence | Gamemag

Florence, a project from a leading designer Monument valley, has become one of the most notable events in the mobile games market. Two years later, a visual novella about love and a breakup reached Nintendo switch and PC.

At the center of this interactive story is the twenty-five-year-old Florence Yeo, who works hard, suffers from loneliness and spends all her free time on social networks. Her contact with her mother is lost, and most of the time she is fixated inside herself in an empty house.

But a chance meeting with cellist Krish changes her whole life. Boring everyday life is filled with colors, the desktop is surrounded by photographs of travel and joint trips, the couple are moving in, and it seems that it will always be so. Until the crisis of relations begins.

Filed through interactive images, the story of different mentalities and cultural features two years later takes on a completely different shade, which the authors did not even try to lay.

A wealthy Florence brings into her life an Indo-Pakistani expat and a loafer who lives on her neck while she works for two. She allows Kish to enter her cultural space, and he demands more and more.

This interpretation of the plot in the new reality of world isolation and the fight against the migration crisis takes on a completely different shade, which makes it more relevant.

The authors themselves, through simplifying puzzles, perfectly demonstrate how mutual understanding between people increases as they search for common interests and how some time later the same puzzles reflect the growing conflict.

And of course, Florence – This is a story about falling in love, finding oneself and a social conflict that reaches the player’s heart through mini-games and interactivity – those elements that modern literature or the usual video format cannot use.