Florence Yeoh is a 25 years old girl, already stuck in her daily life: a not-so-stimulating job, a somehow-too-present mother, some friends, no hobbies.

She goes to work (scrolling through her social media), spends her working hours doing her accountant duties, goes back home, eats some ready meal while watching something, then bed.

Rinse and repeat.

Her life changes when she stumbles into Krish, a street musician playing his cello nearby, filling the air with his fascinating notes, and she gets to know him because of an unexpected event.

The whole artistic section of the game is truly lovely. I've really appreciated the hand-drawn style and its simplicity, giving to it the feeling of an animated graphic novel.
Except for some of the interior scenes, most of the time there is no or a very limited background. This focuses the attention on the two protagonists much more and their evolving relationship.

The colors are pretty, with an abundance of neutral and low-saturated ones with vivid accents (for example there can be a scene with all neutral or light colors but with a very bright one for a t-shirt).

In Florence there is a wide range of different yet quite simple and enjoyable puzzles: from arranging house items in a pleasant way to putting together pieces of conversation balloons in order to make a discussion progress; from restoring a hold memory to replying to Mama's calls.

The puzzles are easy and guided by the game itself, because they are part of the narration and not the key to obtaining the hints needed to progress.
It's a visual novel with some spots of interaction to get you near the protagonists' emotions and feelings, to follow the escalation of their happiness, the up and down of their story and its final slippery slope.

Bonus feature: the story is in chapters, you can replay them as many times as you want. This makes the achievement hunt so much easier!

The game soundtrack is really adorable. I've liked every single track and I've found each of them very fitting for the scene they are set in.

Most of the tracks are lively and inspiring, a perfect and coherent combination with every scene each one is linked with.

I've listen to the whole soundtrack outside the game, keeping all the track in the same sequence of the game, at least 4 or 5 times and I can say that, even without knowing where the OST comes from or what the story is about, you can understand with extremely precision what kind of narrative is hidden within it:

• the calmness and silliness of the first part, that makes you think about your everyday life, going to work, your errands, going out on a sunny day.
• the cheerfulness of the middle part, where there seems to be beautiful events in progress, big and happy changes in life or wonderful good news.
• the more and more low spirit of the last part, something more and more unpleasant going on, perplexity and increasing gloominess, until there's nothing else than sadness. Something's cracking, falling apart or slowly dying.

The only exception is for the very last track that brings you back to the first one, similar but not identical, richer and more lively. Here you catch without doubt that whatever bad or sad has happened is over or has been overcome.

The whole soundtrack is signed by Kevin Penkin and it's possible to buy them as additional content for the game.

Note: if you have never bought a game OST from Steam, be aware that you'll need to download the OST as you do with the games. Then you have two ways to listen to it: doing it through the Steam client (for example from the Steam page of the OST, where you can find a "Play" button) or going to your Steam folder > SteamApps > Music > Florence - Original Soundtrack. Here you'll find the folder and all the .mp3 files, in case you want to use a VLC and other similar softwares or put them into your phone or device to play it anywhere you are!

Florence is a beautiful and classic romantic story, one of those almost everyone can easily relate to. Despite some have described it as full of clichés, I do prefer to talk about "a traditional trope": a girl with a boring life, a casual meet with a nice street artist that evolves into a romantic story and so on.

Very classic.

Very traditional.

It's true.

However, from my point of view it isn't something intrinsically bad: this world can't continue to forge brand-new, perfectly original stories all the time. It's impossible and, beyond this, the very same world is full of people who do likes classic stories and tropes and/or need them at some point of their life.
So why be judging to people who might like a simple story about romanticism with its ups and downs or the game developers for their choices?

I consider myself almost Aromantic and yet I've fully enjoyed it, the narration, the puzzles. It's slow-paced relaxing game, even cozy despite not being fully a bowl of cherries (but life itself isn't as well, is it?) with an interesting (and still classic!) ending.