The Flourishing, by somnauta
For all that I’m maybe a liiiiiitle obsessed with IF (glances over at 802 reviews tallied on IFDB), I don’t tend to gravitate towards non-IF “narrative games”. Probably that’s largely because I play enough IF to scratch that particular itch many times over, so when I play other video games I’m often looking for stuff that’s more systems-driven, and partially because my computer is nowhere near beefy enough to play anything with much in the way of bells and whistles. But whatever the reasons, the upshot is that while I’m familiar with that scene by keeping up with reviews and criticism, I don’t have much direct experience – and in particular, I’m pretty sure I’ve never played a so-called walking simulator, despite it being a reasonably high-profile, accessible genre that’s at least somewhat IF-adjacent.
Still, like I said, I know enough to recognize one when I see it, and The Flourishing definitely has a bunch of walking simulator DNA, while also taking in elements from text-based IF to create a true hybrid form. And it’s pretty cool! While some scenes, including the opening, are relatively static, with text and clickable options, there’s always a graphical backdrop, usually you can use your mouse to look around, and often even move about with WASD, clicking on people or objects you find to advance to the next bit of the story. If you were just getting boring text-box pop-ups, this might feel a bit lackluster, but the Flourishing is very stylish, which extends beyond the minimalist graphics to how the words are presented. The opening, which sees you riding a bus past some mountains, sees its text splayed at an angle across the window, and at various points words slide in from different parts of the screen, take their position near a mirror, or even drape themselves around a strange figure. My favorite part is when you visit your mom and she introduces you to her new puppy, described as a “black whirlwind darting to and fro”, which becomes a shifting word-cloud gamboling through the apartment. This inventive, playful approach continues throughout the game, ensuring there’s always some novelty to draw the player on to the next sequence.
The downside of this visual focus is that sometimes I found it more challenging to engage with the text qua text – that is to say, to read it. The color scheme is a pale pink over a background of red-flecked black, which sometimes caused some light eyestrain, and the game can be rather fussy about stage-managing how you process the text – a lot of it scrolls slowly in on a timer, sometimes moving on regardless of player input, sometimes requiring you to click after every line or two to get to the next bit (there are some options to change the timing of text display, but I didn’t find that futzing around with them made any noticeable difference). The prose style sometimes exacerbates this issue; at least in the early going, the voice is relatively easygoing, but the writing is also fairly prolix, prone at times to adjectivitis, and sometimes I felt like I was putting in a lot of effort to read a bunch of words without as much payoff as I wanted them to have.
I haven’t said much about the content yet, and that’s because it feels decidedly secondary to the novelty of the format. The first half is cryptic yet relatively grounded: you travel on the bus, dividing your attention between an ancient landscape and eavesdropping on your fellow passengers, then shuffle off the bus and walk from the stop into a town – pausing to solve the one puzzle-like challenge along the way. After encountering a bubble-blowing woman and failing to obtain coffee, you meet your mom, grab some food, catch up a little, talk about the Golden Bough get into a slightly tense disagreement about her smoking. There are some details that can be deduced from oblique references – from the way the protagonist obsesses about word choice, they seem to be connected somehow to writing, and their memories of drama classes at school, and the way they’re always traveling, suggests they might be an actor or a director or a playwright. The bubble-woman almost reminds them of someone else, and a few other references suggest they were in a relationship that ended, though the circumstances are obscure. The setting is vaguely European, though there scattered Japanese and Turkish words which seem intentional efforts to mystify proceedings.
Then things take a turn towards the surreal, and I found myself less engaged by the story even as the visuals got trippier. The dreamlike atmosphere gets much more intense, and violence and trauma come to the fore, alongside dialing up the mythological elements. There’s a menacing horned figure, and the libretto of an opera about Orpheus displays in the background – which I don’t think is meant to be literal, but just strengthen the implication that this is a story about an artist violently separated from a lover. The already-scarce moments of specificity from the first half largely fall away, as the register shifts decisively from prose to poetry, some of which is, admittedly, reasonably good and even slightly comic:
red castle of sand
that had been built
on sacred
ground
to a pulp
and abandoned
to gather and gulp
the silt
upon which to stand on
Then there’s an ending that gestures towards a climax, but I’ll admit that this also feel fairly flat for me – I was still enjoying the spectacle, don’t get me wrong, but wasn’t especially invested in the story.
True to its walking-simulator heritage, the Flourishing also doesn’t have much in the way of gameplay to boost engagement. I mentioned the one puzzle, which involves clicking on a background image that I would have ignored but for a camera angle that’s clearly drawing attention to it, and then working through a series of choices to fiddle with a machine. It’s fine so far as it goes, but rather disconnected from the narrative and thematic concerns of the rest of the game. Similarly, while there are a few choices as you go, they’re few and far between, and don’t seem like they lead to much branching – you’re largely just clicking to continue – and even in the free-exploration sequences, there’s only ever one thing you can do to move the story forward, with minimal opportunities for side exploration.
All of this is to say that if you view the Flourishing as a test-bed for how to present a text-focused walking simulator, it’s a smashing success – the format really is very effective, and even with what I’d consider a slightly underbaked story and perfunctory gameplay, it’s still an enjoyable time. I’d play another game like this from the author in a heartbeat – but hopefully they’d have honed some more traditional IF skills in the meantime.