Fellow Niche Gamer staff writer Fingal Belmont turned me on to the genius of Serenity Forge’s games. While visual novels and narratives aren’t usually my thing, he talked me into playing Slay the Princess, and it really opened my eyes to what this genre can actually do. On the surface, Fractured Blooms looks like a cozy day-in-the-life simulator about someone who tends to their garden and does chores around their house. What Fractured Blooms actually became was terrible and compelling, so keep reading to find out what we thought during our preview!
Fractured Blooms starts off innocently enough – a woman is in her garden, picking a tomato for dinner, and then tending to her other plants for a few minutes before taking her tomato inside to prepare dinner. The narrative plays out while you’re doing mundane things such as spreading seeds for beets and watering all of your plants. One thing I immediately noticed was how exhausted the narrator is, and this is backed up by the stamina bar that shows in the bottom left corner. As you complete chores, her stamina drains and you eventually retreat into the house to finish up before you can go to bed to rest.
Her nightly chores include gathering ingredients from different rooms in the house in order to make dinner, combining the ingredients and actually cooking dinner (this was done by putting a pot on the burner and counting to 30 so you don’t burn the stew), and then gathering up dirty laundry from other rooms and tossing them into the washing machine. Once the day ends, she rests and you regain stamina based on how well you did on your previous day’s chores. I kept getting lost so I ran out of time gathering the laundry (partially due to the music making me tense and the weird red blob areas that start appearing), so I only got a minor amount of stamina back for day two.
On day two, you’ll roughly do the same thing, but you’ll notice some changes and these changes start to give more weight to the gravity of what’s actually going on. This woman is not only haunted by a voice in her head, but her garden is growing something sinister, and it’s up to you to figure out how this story will play out. The demo wasn’t all that long, but it was intensely compelling. The voice actress was the same woman who voiced the princess in Slay the Princess, so that was a cool little throwback having been familiar with a different Serenity Forge title.
While this game might not have initially been on my radar before I played the demo at PAX, the sound design in this game is absolutely incredible and made me want to keep playing. Rarely do games give me an emotional connection, but this game gave me goosebumps because the tension in the sound design was so expertly executed. Wishlist it on Steam because fans of Serenity Forge or other narrative driven stories, Fractured Blooms is likely to be a sleeper smash hit that you may not have ever seen coming.
