When I started playing ‘Florence’ I was grieving an older version of myself. I was ready to let go of a previous relationship, and the person I had been in it. I was doing things I had never done before such as swimming. I brought back some old rituals like reading at least 35 pages at night before sleeping, taking care of small plants, and cooking things that I love to eat.
At the same time, I mourned the person I had been for the last 5 years. Transitions aren’t easy and I kept going back and forth between that older self and the newer one. That to me is the essence of ‘Florence’.
Developed by the Australian studio Mountains and published by Annapurna Interactive, the game follows a 25-year old Florence whose mundane life is overturned when she falls in love with the cellist Krish.
Through a series of small, self-contained scenes, we experience Florence and Krish fall in love, and watch their relationship grow. Subtle gameplay vignettes like brushing her teeth or piecing together a dialogue through puzzles, provide concise, sensory-driven slices of life that really stand out on their own.
Zoom in to those little moments
As writers, we are familiar with vignettes. The less-than 1000 word fragments that set a mood rather than complete the story…more like snapshots than the whole picture.
Hemingway distills fleeting moments between two waiters and an old man at a café in his short story, A Clean Well-Lighted Place:
They sat together at a table that was close against the wall near the door of the café and looked at the terrace where the tables were all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind.
Nothing dramatic happens here. There are two waiters, an old man, and the shadow of leaves shifting in the wind. Yet in that one snapshot, we feel loneliness, dignity, and the weight of existence.
Or take Margaret Atwood’s The Female Body, where she describes tending to the body with absurd precision
I get up in the morning. My topic feels like hell. I sprinkle it with water, brush parts of it, rub it with towels, powder it, add lubricant. I dump in the fuel and away goes my topic…
These moments are zoomed in. All the other distractions are gone, you don’t need them right now. You simply need to stay focused on the little moments.
This is the same power that ‘Florence’ wields. When Krish shares his dreams with Florence, we get to realise that dream ourselves, simply by gliding our fingers across the screen as he plays the cello. Similarly, Florence’s dream of becoming an artist comes to life when we help her paint a butterfly. These intimate moments shape who they are, while the larger chapters of the game weave these fragments into a fuller story.
Let the moments linger in your story
The most devastating yet beautiful moment in the game comes as a picture puzzle of Krish and Florence locked in a hug.
(If you haven’t played the game yet, I would ask you to stop reading here.)
By this point, we already sense what’s coming. The change is inevitable with its reclusive complexities. Yet right before you make that change, you make one last attempt to hold on. The familiarity, the comfort, and the hope that things might still return to how they once were.
We linger in solving that puzzle. We pause in the hug, knowing it cannot last, yet unwilling to let it go. That moment is heavy with the desire to stay, even as the story pulls us forward.
Think about what Virginia Woolf wrote in The Waves (another vignetter piece by the way):
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
That’s what moments like this capture, the constant remaking of ourselves through every connection.
Our readers, too, want to linger there. They want to sit with a feeling rather than be rushed to act on it. As writers, it’s our job to create that space in our pieces. Vignettes can do that. Inject them into product descriptions, articles, social media posts. Let them do their magic.
