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Review
The Flourishing is a surreal, dreamlike work that appears to be about the difficulties of artistic expression and choosing the life of an artist. In a series of disjointed scenes, the PC rides a bus, wanders a city, and takes the stage in a theatre, and converses with his mother, a series of mysterious women, and himself.
Unusually, The Flourishing is a sort of hybrid of IF and a graphical walking simulator; most of the game proceeds as choice-based IF that does some fancy things with the text, but there are segments in which you will be exploring a 3D environment. These segments are in first-person POV, so anyone who is prone to motion sickness with this camera perspective may wish to skip this game.
In a somewhat odd decision, the game doesn't specify what the control scheme is. I play a lot of non-IF games myself, so quickly figured out that it uses WASD for movement, but there's a contingent of IF players who don't play graphical games at all who would probably be at a loss for how to proceed. And I'm accustomed to graphical indie games specifying their control schemes, since WASD is common but not the only one—you might move with the arrow keys or by clicking on the area you want to move to, for example.
The game also doesn't tell you it has a settings menu or how to access said menu, so I was about 3/4 of the way through the game when I accidentally brought it up while trying to tab away from the game and realized it was possible to speed up the timed text. (I did still find the fastest speed too slow, but I am a very fast reader so others may not.)
I did like the scribbly "3D lineart" look of the graphics, and the prose has a playfulness to it that's often charming (I'd offer quotes, but due to the format of the game I would've had to retype them and I was too lazy for that). The overall narrative didn't really click for me, even though I am, like the PC, someone who both makes games and has a performing arts background (the PC seems to have trained as an opera singer, though it's not clear whether that or the games or both are what he's trying to make a living from). I think it might have been just a little too elliptical and disjointed.
The experience is sort of like listening to a stranger describe a dream they had while making copious references to context from their real life that they're acting like you already know despite the fact that you've never met them before. And I'm not the kind of person who goes on about how boring it is when people describe their dreams! I think it can be quite entertaining; it's all in how you tell it. In this case, unfortunately, the manner of the telling didn't quite work for me.
