The Flourishing (somnauta)
Played on: 4th September
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows
How long I spent: 55 minutes for one playthrough
I’ve had a bit of trouble collecting my thoughts on The Flourishing. You might notice from my reviews that I’m a very literal-minded person, so games which are more abstract often throw me. Please forgive me if I’m way off-base with what I took from The Flourishing – I think I’ve got the gist of it but I’m sure all sorts of things passed me by, and because I think it’s a tone piece as much as a story, I don’t want to spend too much time “solving” it. I think it’s deliberately vague in some aspects to let the player bring themselves to the art and provide space for reflection. (At least I hope so, because if it’s saying exactly what it means, I really am stupid.)
In the most literal recounting of events, we’re a performer who travels for work, visiting our mother for the first time in a long time. We have plenty of time for introspection and conversations with ourselves. As the story continues, however, things get more abstract; we cut to scenes with no clear sense of time or place – a flash flood, a conversation on a park bench – our imaginary(?) conversation partner asserts themselves more, and we build to a disorienting climax.
Let’s just stick to the nuts and bolts of The Flourishing for now. This is a 3D game made in the Godot engine, giving it a strong visual identity. The base colour is black with peach outlines and the occasional smattering of red. Objects and buildings are identifiable but humans are represented eerily, not quite as stick figures but more like circulatory systems, as if they’re being seen as flesh and blood rather than as people. With this, we get a handful of first-person free movement scenes, although these get more linear in the back half of the game.
Despite those scenes, this is primarily a text-based game. Text is printed in all manner of ways, sometimes simply on the screen and sometimes as part of the environment, playfully integrated with the camera’s point of view. Some of this text is synced up with visual effects and events, which means we hit the old timed-text problem here, but there are text speed options in the menu accessed by pressing the Escape key which may alleviate this. (I didn’t check because I forgot the menu was there.) Timed text doesn’t bother me so much, but I wish there was a visual indicator for when the game is waiting for the player’s input. Occasionally I got stuck waiting around for the next paragraph to appear, not realising that I now needed to click through.
The writing is a bit hard to talk about without spoilers and before examining the themes of The Flourishing more, but I do want to talk about it here, because I’m in two minds about it and the criticism may seem a little unkind. The writing is at its best when it’s elliptical and poetic. We are largely given the emotional state of the player character through allegory and vibes, and the poetry is very good at that. The best is saved for the last couple of minutes of the game, but here’s a slightly earlier example:
As quietly determined as a child building castles in the sand, I’d build mine in the sky, but I never stopped to question whether sand is the appropriate material. And when the heavy rains laid siege upon the ramparts, I paid them no heed. Eventually, the walls gave and the water started streaming in.
(Any typos are mine – I transcribed this from a screenshot.) It’s a good metaphor, it’s evocative, it expresses a sense of self-loathing without saying so outright, and it works in a wry sense of humour.
But The Flourishing is less successful when it comes to conversations, especially those the player character has with himself. I’m having a bit of trouble phrasing this – earlier drafts of this review have been unnecessarily picky because it happens to be about a style of writing that bugs me. The conversations can get very long, spanning several screens of text, and they’re very snarky, but they don’t deliver any actual jokes or tell us much about the character. They can feel very cliché. To be mean for just a second, there are a couple of self-referential lines (e.g.” I’m talking to myself in a mirror. I can’t quite tell if this is a testament to my playfulness or an indication of profound loneliness.”) which are not far removed from the “did you just x” style of quip that gets tiresome quickly. There’s a late scene that uses a lot of old-hat horror writing tropes for a couple of paragraphs (“itburnsitburnsitburns” and the like), and it’s a shame because it overplays and undercuts a pretty good visual reveal.
That said, I think I understand the purpose of these self-conversations, as part of the broader themes of The Flourishing. To state what’s obvious from playing the game, there’s an emphasis on performances throughout, both to the outside world and to ourselves. We see this in our conversations with the mirror, our visitations to theatres, and even in the blurb (whose rambling about the number 7 wearing “a mask of agreeableness” does not seem to be literally relevant to the game’s content, unless I really missed something). It’s in the title – “Flourishing” has a double meaning as both growth and performance. The player character wears a “mask of agreeableness” in conversation with other characters, but monologues and asides bubble unexpectedly with self-loathing (especially in the potential aftermath of a conversation with your mother about her smoking habit) and an inability to take oneself seriously, leading to an inability to confront an ugly truth lying forgotten somewhere at the back of the mind. The player character quips and snarks because it’s easier than full-on emotional honesty.
I take my cues from the content warning in the blurb when I say that this speaks to an experience of trauma and suppression. I’m lucky enough not to have had this experience, so I’ll be interested in reading reviews from people more familiar with the matter, should they be willing to share. I don’t think we learn the exact nature of what the player character is trying not to relive (nor is it important, really), but “the point of impact” is a recurring metaphor, as is the imagery of flooding and escaping water. Other than these oblique hints we skirt around the subject while the player character changes the subject, but it’s always present. I like the visual metaphor throughout of a mountain that’s in the background of most scenes, which we learn is called Melancholy Hill – it’s distant but we see its silhouette throughout the game, outlined in red, threatening to obscure the moon. It is always looming, always a monumental presence.
The Flourishing is not for me, and I don’t think I’m well-equipped to analyse it. I’m hoping I’ve done it justice though, because there are players who this will really speak to, and I’d like it to find its audience.
