Style Over Substance

Written by Danielle Karthauser

In her video essay about Rent, Lindsay Ellis discusses how the Broadway musical and subsequent film adaptation dresses itself up as defiant art but does very little in the way of actually defying anything to bring about the actual change it desires. In other words, the story looks pretty but does as little as possible.

While Rent is a whole topic in itself, I bring it up (and Ellis’s essay) because much in the same way that movie left me feeling empty after watching it, Florence contained a similar emptiness when I finished the game. Now the two stories contain no similarities by any stretch of the imagination, nor is Florence a bad or pretentious game. Rent is attempting to do something far larger than Florence and crashes far harder. But I think in a similar way to Rent, Florence presents itself as a narrative that holds much more complexity than it actually follows through with. It has a beautiful art style and mesmerizing music, but a flat narrative. The game looks pretty but does very little.

It can be very easy to fall into the trap of dressing a story up but giving it no substance. The Disney live action remakes do this all the time when they attempt to critique the past of their company without actually doing anything meaningful or interesting. They trick the audience to believe otherwise with celebrity casting and nostalgia. While the Disney live action remakes are a more cynical example, they fit into this discussion.

Florence is a game about love. Beneath the initial plot the game also seems to have themes about creativity and loneliness in the digital age. At its most basic, Florence begins the game unhappy, finds love, loses love, and reignites what makes her happy. The final shot is of Florence gazing out the window of her art studio, doing what she loves and everything is right with the world.

Florence is “designed for an audience that doesn’t play games a lot and maybe feels some trepidation about playing games,” says the game’s creator, Ken Wong. Phone games, more often than not, are designed as systems with quick and easy level design and continuous reward. Because of this, it is very easy to get sucked into a phone game because it doesn’t require a lot of thinking and the player doesn’t need to invest a lot of time with it (and subsequently ends up investing far more time than they ever anticipated). If given the choice to take out a book or play a phone game on the bus, most will choose the phone game. Florence is not like these games, at least not in the way of designing itself to keep the player coming back for more, only to be overloaded by ads. Rather, it exists alongside these games as short and painless. It doesn’t give the player the same shot of dopamine as Bejeweled, but it promises a short experience which appeals to our fast paced lifestyle.

Thus in one regard, Florence is an attempt to heighten the mobile phone game experience from something more than a mindless way to pass the time. Wong says, “We don’t have words in the game. There’s no dialogue or narration. It plays out a bit like a comic without words, which I’m a fan of, but also like a silent movie or a music video, where you’re going to be reading a lot into body language and how these characters move throughout the world and looking through their possessions.” Wong is interested in non-traditional forms of storytelling, and this is not a bad thing. Exploring ways in which we tell stories is very positive.

Yes Florence is a beautiful game. It’s use of silence is clever, the art style is wonderfully minimalist, and the musical score is beautiful. These make up Florence as a whole, but I also think they can distract from the story’s flaws. Aesthetically, it draws us in, but these aesthetics can distract from what is really going on.

For all of the nuance that seems to be happening within the gameplay, the design, and the musical score, the story is simply lacking. It fails to move beyond anything but a love story, and there is nothing wrong with that at first glance, but the game is clearly trying to do more and never follows through. It plants seeds throughout the story such as Florence’s poor relationship with her mother and her loneliness. But these seeds are planted and ignored, never allowed to grow or have any significant meaning in the context of the story.

The final moments of the game give off a sense that everything is good now for Florence and that is it. Her relationship with her mother is mended, she is no longer sad and lonely, and she now has a successful career. She was once unhappy and now she is happy. It implies that growth leads to some magical place of happiness that doesn’t exist. The game longs to be a very human story but ends on a fairy tale note. Much like posts on social media, and mobile phone games, Florence feels like it ends on the shallow note in which it sought to critique. It looks pretty but doesn’t have much to say.

As a love story, Florence is very simple and focused. The ending is not bad due to it being happy. I promise I’m not that cynical. Indeed the happy ending feels earned in the context of said love story. Florence falls in love and when that love ends, she learns to move on. But it is almost too simple. It fails to build on its own plot threads. Florence isn’t just moving on but quitting her job, having a stable enough art career to quit said job, and also mends her relationship with her mother. Everything good happens all at once, as if it is that simple. It is as if the problems were just that easy. All the while, pretty music plays over top the game and it is supposed to feel good.

Though Florence is not a bad game, it seems to be trying to do more than it actually achieves. It wants to have its cake and eat it too. While it is stylistically beautiful, this style does a good job at covering up where the game’s story fell flat. Just as a phone game exists to make us feel as if we accomplished something without doing much at all, Florence can feel the same way. It is a beautiful game, but it doesn’t follow through on many of the things it is trying to say.