I had a variety of subtopics in mind for my return to Flowers, and we’ll probably get to a few of them, but at the moment, I can only really feel one strong emotion towards this game: resentment. There are many unique dramatic tricks only made possible by interactive art; but at the same time, there are just as many potential dramatic hurdles, and ways in which your narrative trajectory can be contradicted by your gameplay options. For many games, this disconnect is most apparent in their treatment of violence – characters will torture themselves over difficult moral questions in cutscenes, and then we’ll return to controlling them, and happily murder hundreds of people. In Flowers’ case, it came in a different, but equally frustrating form: a blunt and unexpected fail state.

I was actually quite looking forward to returning to Flowers. The last time I played this game was at the beginning of the summer, and frankly, my life has been pretty damn hard since then. The Kyoto Animation fire absolutely gutted me, and was followed by more tragedies in my personal life, complementing the rapidly worsening state of the world at large. Considering my professional work is closely tied to my own personal capacity for enthusiasm, it’s at times been hard to even feel like I can do my job effectively. At times like this, I can really use something like Flowers’ encouragement to “forget your troubles and enjoy this beautiful yuri world.”

The beginning of my play session seemed happy to pamper me, as I was introduced back to Suoh’s school with gentle, inviting piano and a soothing violin. With its insecure protagonist and many accommodating classmates, Flowers seems to embody the promise of so much much media: “experience divorced from consequence.” We all want to try various things in life, but are often held back by our fear of negative consequences – of being shamed, turned down, or forced in some way to recognize ourselves as failures. Visual novels offer the promise of experience without consequence, of making bold choices without the fear of lasting failure. Many games work hard to create a sense of consequence in their play (like the Dark Souls franchise, which I love, in spite of it being all about making the player feel unsafe). But it’s just as valid to embrace the inherent distance of playing a game, and make an experience that indulges an audience’s simultaneous desire for novelty and security.

I was happy to indulge in that security from my position on Suoh’s shoulder, as she continued to misunderstand social exchanges in a variety of painfully relatable ways. As I noted in my first article, Flowers is quite sharp about conveying the lived experience of being an insecure or even socially maladjusted adolescent. Suoh’s fears are expressed in familiar ways throughout (like her perpetual conviction that anyone who’s talking must be gossiping about her), but also through less thoroughly established flourishes of characterization. I particularly liked her assessment of Rikka’s social success as a direct byproduct of Rikka possessing “wisdom, empathy, and sweetness.”

Creating labels and social formulas like this is a common tactic of adolescent loners. Though they tend to see these categorizations as reflective of genuine human insight, in truth, they’re mostly just coping mechanisms, ways to feel secure in a totally bewildering world. For those who have difficulty with social interactions, it can help to try and create rigid frameworks of character assessment, in order to find a coherent explanation for the social dynamics that rule their lives. Ultimately, people are far more complicated than such frameworks can express; but Suoh is very far from learning that point, and her reliance on these frameworks feels totally convincing.

Many of chapter two’s most interesting moments were similarly well-observed case studies regarding the limitations of perspective. Likely my favorite scene of this chapter concerned Suoh and her two roommates Rikka and Mayuri discussing Wuthering Heights, which Mayuri first describes as a “revenge narrative.” Her companions immediately question this characterization, leading to a discussion that naturally highlights the ambiguity of perspective, and how it relates to both our impressions of art and our own identities. Whether you see Wuthering Heights as a romance, a tragedy, or a revenge story, each of those framings reflects a different perspective on human nature, passion, and social order. Learning that Mayuri believes Heathcliff was wronged tells us something fundamental to her, even if we’re not entirely sure what that fundamental thing is.

Personally, I don’t think I’m a particularly complex person when it comes to the relationship between art and character. I’m a quiet, introspective person who tends to enjoy quiet, introspective fiction. Sequences like that very conversation are candy to me, preoccupied as they are with exactly what I find fascinating about human connection and life in general. I similarly enjoy stories that exist simply to capture quiet, beautiful, and emotionally resonant moments, or the lived experience of spending warm days with friends. Flowers’ focus on close personal feelings and a soothing, judgment-free environment thus greatly appealed to me… which is exactly why its design choices so frustrated me, as well.

Though most of this chapter is taken up by Suoh simply trying to get closer to her new classmates, there’s also a mystery undercurrent running throughout, centered on books disappearing from the library. As the newly appointed library representative, Suoh feels personally responsible for resolving their absence, particularly when her whole class learns about the theft. But ultimately, the missing books reappear on her roommate Rikka’s bed, leading to a series of arguments that threaten to tear their relationship apart. Eventually, Suoh comes to some revelation about this mystery, and rushes off to meet a new girl who apparently holds the answer. The new girl smiles at Suoh’s arrival, and agrees to help her resolve the conflict with Rikka – but only if the player can correctly guess her name, based on four literary titles and whatever clues they’d gathered through the course of the chapter.

I myself didn’t have have a clue what this girl’s name was, as I hadn’t really been paying attention to the mystery plot, and had felt consistently underwhelmed by Flowers’ literary allusions. Normally that wouldn’t matter – stories possess different appeals for different people, and while I’ve never been a person who cares at all for mysteries, I was still greatly enjoying Flowers’ character writing and atmosphere. So I picked a name at random, and was told this name was incorrect – leading into a scene where I was abruptly informed that Suoh and Rikka’s relationship never recovered, and that this was Game Over, and I had to start from my save again.

As a general rule, I deeply dislike feeling like a work of art isn’t valuing my time; like it assumes I’ll keep watching or reading simply because it exists, and that it is not obligated to reward my investment with any sort of aesthetic or emotional payoff. This is essentially the fundamental agreement of storytelling: the audience agrees to surrender their time to the artist, and the artist ensures that time is not wasted. So on a very immediate level, being asked to redo a chapter of reading because I didn’t answer a question correctly did not sit right with me.

That was only the first, immediate inconvenience level of frustration, though. More importantly, this harsh “game over” felt like a direct contradiction of everything this story represented. Flowers is thematically centered on the difficulty of reaching out and expressing yourself in a social sense, and the fear of making mistakes or being rejected. The game’s gameplay should theoretically have been emphasizing that we all make mistakes in social engagements, and they aren’t the end of the world – instead, one error in conversation here served as the literal end of Suoh’s social life. And tonally, what happened to that “forgetting my troubles” that Flowers promised? After assuming I was playing a character drama with a heavy slice of life bent, I was only informed after the fact that I was actually being quizzed on a mystery, and should have been perpetually seeking clues.

Finally, as I said before, I simply don’t like mysteries very much. I don’t care about solving narratives based on disparate clues, and would much rather talk about tone or characterization than plotting or secrets. While the first several hours of Flowers allowed me to enjoy the game in the way I wanted to enjoy it, I was ultimately punished for not sharing the creators’ passion for mysteries, and walled off from the material I actually enjoyed by the material I was previously happy to breeze over. The will of Flowers’ creators overrode my own engagement with the property, demanding I enjoy Flowers their way or not at all.

And given that choice, I will regretfully but unreservedly choose “not at all.” There are many elements of visual novels that fascinate me, but even more that tend to confound or frustrate me. I don’t want my interactions with a text like this to be antagonistic; that feels like a direct contradiction of every other thing the story is doing. I don’t want to be asked to care about details buried in sprawling incidental conversations; I want to be able to enjoy a story even if I’m not the type to diagram all my encounters. I came in expecting “experience without consequence,” and instead received “consequence without warning or context.” There was a great deal I enjoyed about Flowers, but it’s hard to feel enthusiastic about a story that doesn’t want me there.

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