Fractured Blooms’ Demo Is A Striking Vertical Slice With Shades of PT
While this summer saw too many game announcements to count, Fractured Blooms was among those that stood out, a blend of psychological horror and farming sim that looked quite unnerving. While it’s certainly not the only game that mixes coziness with something “dark” (hell, it’s not the only farming horror game teased this year), its seemingly somber tone and tagline that it’s “Inspired by a true story” made it seem like it wasn’t going for shock value and cheap scares.
And at least from the game’s pre-alpha demo, which releases on Steam today, that initial impression bears out. What I played of Fractured Blooms was an intriguing slow burn that offered scares alongside heavy topics without this subject matter coming across as cheap or unearned.
Here, you play as Angie, a teen girl trapped in an endless cycle of menial labor. She’s stuck in a time loop where her only course of action is to tend the garden, cook dinner for out-of-sight parents, do laundry, and then sleep. Of course, there’s more to it than that, though, and as the loops repeat, her surroundings become more nightmarish, as monstrous red flowers bloom.
The centerpiece of the game’s tone, though, is Angie’s consistent inner monologue. She starts out dry and informative, explaining the next chore she needs to do—as much as to the player as herself—but before long, her words get at the underlying stresses and subtle horrors of her homelife. She alludes to her never-to-be-seen parents, who are at once absent and omnipresent, with the implication that something bad will happen if she steps out of line. And most pointedly, she gets at how she feels utterly trapped in a daily routine that sucks the life from her; an endless list of tasks that leaves no space for anything else.
These feelings of anxiety aren’t just reflected in Angie’s inner voice, but also in gameplay. Things begin pleasantly enough: we pick the tomatoes, spread some seeds in the garden, and then water both, taking as much time as we need. Then comes cooking. Outside of a radio announcer’s slightly creepy voice, things remain relatively calm. Well, besides the protagonist’s increasingly dour description of her existence, and the ominous allusion to the house having a “mind of its own” as you find a knife on the counter, that is.
Once you go upstairs, though, Angie’s stress becomes our own. As she explains that she needs to do laundry before bed, a timer appears, loudly counting down from three minutes as you sprint through an upstairs layout that’s quite easy to get lost in. You’ll almost inevitably enter the same place twice and quietly curse as the timer continues to tick, or frantically search for the room you missed as precious seconds slip away. Also, there’s an unexplained buzzing aberration in the corner of your room, the first explicit sign that something is outwardly “wrong.”
When you do finish up, the significance of the countdown is revealed: the longer it takes you to clean up, the less sleep Angie gets and the less stamina she has for doing chores the next day. In my case, as she went to sleep and jolted back to the start of the loop, she had three stamina bars instead of the four she had at the beginning of the previous day. Now there are tasks that she’s supposed to do, but can’t; Angie’s frustration over not being able to complete everything is passed on to the player.
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