The Flourishing

The Flourishing

This is a downloadable Godot game that includes 3d art depicted as peach or reddish wires wrapped around an invisible model.

It jumps around and is surreal. I've played it twice but don't know what happens. I had theories but they don't hold together. In the game, you go on a train trip home, interact in surreal ways with several objects, see your mom who is getting back into smoking, trip and hit your head, and then there's something we refuse to confront involving a knife and blood. We also have self-introspection and there's a symbolic woman, and lines of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Italian spiral around us.

Visually, the game is extremely good for my tastes. The way the meaning of the logo is revealed is especially well-done.

Story-wise, I feel like it does a great job of presenting emotion, an okay job with developing characters, and a bad job of plot. But that may be intentional; some of the best short stories of all time are also emotion-based rather than plot based.

I do think that the somewhat-timed text (which you can speed up except for a few cutscenes), 3d interface and download-only may put some people off of this and limit its potential audience.

Overall, though, I'm glad this game exists and that I played it. It has a kind of raw element to it that I don't identify with but empathize with, and I like the artistic direction. It has some strong profanity that seems in character with our PC.