TIME EXTEND
Florence
Why this award-winning mobile favourite is more than just a love story
By Chris Schilling
Developer Mountains Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch Release 2018
Florence Yeoh encounters Krish Hemrajani, and it’s not love at first sight – it’s love at first sound. Their meetcute is a combination of two different relationship metaphors, wonderfully and wordlessly illustrated in a sequence in which the title character is both knocked sideways (the game switching from portrait to landscape orientation for a single chapter) and quite literally swept off her feet (she floats dreamily past fellow pedestrians, buoyed along by the bright melody coming from Krish’s cello). And Kevin Penkin’s delightful score offers a third. If a particularly well-suited couple are said to make beautiful music together, then Florence and Krish would appear to be the perfect match, her cheerful piano and his dancing strings contributing equally to a gorgeous, lively duet as their relationship blossoms.
Before the two hook up, however, we get a sense that the life of this 25-year-old Australian office drone is getting away from her somewhat. It’s there in the gloomy colours of the comic-strip-style panels depicting her daily life; the way her headphones dampen the noises of the world on her commute; the way her gaze is fixed upon her phone as she numbly scrolls through social media feeds, with you thumbing likes and shares on her behalf. In one of many shrewd details, only the bottom half of each image is displayed: she’s not really looking closely enough to care.
It’s in the second chapter, following some tidying up (depicted, in amusingly relatable fashion, via three static panels which show Florence shoving a vacuum cleaner into an already overstuffed cupboard), that colour first floods back into her world. A tottering tower of her belongings collapses, revealing a box of childhood mementos. We’re transported back 18 years to Florence sitting in front of a blank piece of paper as a smiling seven-year-old, cutting up pieces of coloured paper to create bright collages: first a sailing boat, then a butterfly. She studies the latter briefly, before boxing it up and putting it away, returning to her colourless existence, until her phone runs out of battery on that fateful morning, and the strains of Krish’s cello reach her ears.