Bloom
by RNG Party Games | get it here
If it's felt like a long time since I posted a Playdate review, that's because it has been. Because I've been slowly chipping away at Bloom, which bills itself—per its catalog page—as a "real-time narrative-driven social sim". The result is a game that you won't be playing more than once or twice a day, a couple minutes at a time. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
In Bloom, you play as Midori, a young woman who skips college to fulfill her dream of opening a flower shop. Unexpectedly, the gameplay doesn't center on running the shop; instead, it's split between the following activities: tending Midori's rooftop garden, and talking to Midori's friends, family, and customers via text message.
It's the latter that the bulk of the game centers around. When Midori receives a text from a contact, you'll have the opportunity to select one of two options to reply back with. Generally, both of these options will be similar in content and tone, so you're mostly choosing for flavor; I didn't get the sense that the responses from other characters were ever altered based on Midori's reply. In some cases, it was clear that the response dialogue I received back was more suited for the option I hadn't picked, but this was thankfully rare. This was never an issue for me (I don't mind being railroaded a bit for the sake of the story), but I imagine not everybody enjoys the illusion of choice.
The conversation will generally go back and forth for a few messages until it peters out naturally. You might be talking with two or three characters at the same time, but eventually the game will cease new conversations until a certain amount of real-world time has passed. The in-game passing of time is supposed to mimic the IRL passing of time, and at times it does do this to good effect. However, the system that manages this does seem to get a little confused on occasion—I noticed a handful of times where I concluded one conversation, just for the next one to come in immediately despite the text implying that there had been a gap in time.
Again, minor stuff, mostly because I'm not going to sit here and go "ugh, great, the game is giving me more of the story instead of making me wait". I want the story, that's what I'm here for! While the constraint of being told entirely through text message has the potential to be detrimental, I quite liked the approach, and it really helped me engage with the characters. Despite me being the kind of person who insists on proper capitalization and punctuation in his texts—even when drinking (ESPECIALLY when drinking)—I loved the fun, Gen Z-inspired, emoji-and-text-speak-fueled exchanges with Midori's girlfriend Ai; similarly, I always grumbled whenever a text from Mom came in, because that's just what you naturally do whenever your parents are texting you (not to mention, from the get-go Midori is lying to her parents about going to college, and you just know that other shoe is going to drop at some point...). I won't spoil anything here, but the developer manages to weave some of these individual threads together into a single climactic (and chaotic) moment at the end of the main story, and even though it took me entirely by surprise, gosh it was a lot of fun.
(As an aside, if you read my Voidblazers review, you may recall I mentioned my love of pre-established cute couples in media. Since they're relatively rare, I was pleasantly surprised to find another one so soon after the last. Midori and Ai definitely get Skep's Cute Couple Stamp of Approval™.)
Now, when the end of the main story came around suddenly and unexpectedly, I expected to be a little disappointed at how quickly everything wrapped up. While it was fitting, it definitely left me with a "...is that it?" moment. But it turns out, the answer is no; there's actually enough conversation after the official conclusion that the game effectively doubles in length. The quality of writing remains the same throughout, but the stakes aren't as high for Midori at this point, so I feel like ending the main portion of the story as early as they did is entirely justified (also, to be perfectly clear, I don't think I've 100% finished the postscript at the time of writing, but it feels like it could be drawing to a close. Though maybe I'll be surprised by an Act III, who knows).
Okay, so, if you've forgotten, I did mention TWO parts to this game (good lord I spent five paragraphs on just the story). The second involves maintaining Midori's rooftop garden, which supposedly is where her shop's stock comes from. You purchase seeds from the catalog, plant them, water them, wait for them to grow (generally about a real-life day), then harvest them, netting you profit.
While it's a nice way to give you something else to do when you check in on the game, in reality, there is zero connection between the gardening mechanics and the story. Now that I think about it, you could probably play Bloom and only engage with either the texting or gardening portions, and ignore the other entirely. I don't think this is inherently a bad thing, but the simplicity of the gardening gameplay quickly makes it very tempting to ignore. You do unlock more seed types as you go, but there's nothing incentivizing you from doing anything except purchasing the most expensive seeds you can afford, planting a full patch of those, and maximizing your profits so you can unlock more garden space. It seems like there is a mechanic where different seeds grow at different rates, but you're not supposed to be checking in on the game more than once or twice a day anyway, so I never noticed this actually taking place. At the very least, I would have added a system based around demand at the shop that would have incentivized maintaining patches of different flowers, as well as making the variations in their growth rates more pronounced, so there would be a little bit more (optional) strategy in figuring out what to plant when.
(LATE-STAGE UPDATE: Just now, a character messaged Midori about giving her some mystery seeds, and then the seed appeared in my inventory. This is the first integration between the two portions of the game I've come across. Bit of a neat surprise!)
There's a few other minor features, such as a once-a-day gacha pull collect-a-thon, and a minigame which is pretty much just a clone of the arcade title Asteroids. There is a rival character who talks to you based on your performance in this minigame, but I'm not very good at Asteroids, and every time I managed eke past the high score it would just be reset much higher than it was previously, so I decided that storyline wasn't worth pursuing after a while.
The game also features a "chill mode", where the soundtrack plays and the game art depicts Midori and her cat Io in what is clearly a riff on the lofi hip hop radio beats to relax/study to station on Youtube. I never really used this mode because it seems like the soundtrack—despite indeed being cozy and calming—only consisted of maybe three songs, but it's still a cute homage (and to be completely fair, the Coffee Talk soundtrack is over 2.5 hours but every song sounds the exact same to me, so maybe this is just a me problem).
Other minor notes:
- The art is both unique and lovely (considering that the Playdate only uses TWO colors!), and I especially enjoyed the phone backgrounds that were unlocked over the course of the game.
- The sidebar on the right of the screen feels like a lot of wasted space. One square shows the shop front with a sign saying whether it's open or closed; but the front door is always open either way, and you never see any customers coming or going. The other square shows Midori's face; as best as I can tell, she only ever shows neutral and happy expressions, and the neutral one is so rare that I only see it if I happen to accidentally skip a day playing—at which point she becomes happy again as soon as I harvest a single flower. Her expression can be happy even when it doesn't match her current mood in the story, so there's a bit of dissonance there.
- The crank sees regular use but in a limited capacity; it scrolls through text chats, and is also used to "operate the elevator" that acts as the transition between Midori's apartment and the rooftop garden. The elevator bit is unnecessary but a cute touch regardless.
I have to point out, I can't help but feel as though I'm coming off overly-critical or at least quite nitpicky as I review some of these games. But despite everything, I like checking in on Bloom regularly. It's just a small little heartwarming thing I can pick up here or there when I need it, and I haven't regretted purchasing it for a second.
- Gameplay: Low
- Presentation: High
- Crankitude: Low
Verdict: It's a little funny how Ai gets addicted to a gardening game with more in-depth mechanics than this one.