Is there anything worse than your parents sending you to a relative’s house for the summer? Maybe if that relative is your curmudgeonly old grandpa and he lives in, eugh, the SUBURBS. Of course, he’s going to make you do things like clean up around the house, tend to his garden, and cook your own meals. Bloomtown: A Different Story takes place in Bloomtown, a suburb of Chicago, and stars brother and sister combo Emily and Chester. Sent away by their working mother amid a parental dispute at home, they’re left in the care of their grandfather Cooper who doesn’t appear to like them very much. Things seem like they can’t get worse until on the first night, Emily makes a deal with Lucifer themselves.
Bloomtown: A Different Story
Developer: Different Sense Games
Price: $25
Platforms: PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PS5 code for review
I was a little shocked, after playing Bloomtown: A Different Story for a while, that it wore its influences on its sleeve so proudly. Another world sleeps beneath Bloomtown, known only as the Underside, and Emily has somehow found her way inside. Thanks to her literal deal with the devil, Emily and her friends can control, capture, and fuse demons. Fusion simply increases the demon’s level, but each character has their primary demon and can equip an ancillary demon to supplement their skills. Navigating the Underside has small dungeon puzzles, combat, and safe rooms that allow you to use a public phone to escape the dungeon. There’s a workshop in your bedroom that can be used once the mascot character teaches you how to make lockpicks.
Bloomtown: A Different Story is a Suburban Summer with a Sinister Twist
After signing the contract, you’re given the task of finding and subduing three demons that have taken over important figures in the town. Along with your primary task, you have a lot of little secondary tasks that involve making friends around town and helping the citizens of Bloomtown out. Emily also manages to make friends with Ramona, a girl whose father is an alcoholic cop (they’re a dime a dozen, Ramona), and an intelligent Pembroke Welsh Corgi named Hugo. Hugo is an adorable little boy who has the ability to be the cutest, fuzziest, sweetest little bean known to man. He also has a keen sense of smell and his battle sprite has him standing bipedal with big muscles, which I find hilarious.-
With the team formed, Emily can delve into the Underside and take care of those nasty demons, or she could go about her life doing summery suburb things. Bloomtown has a lot to offer, even for a cynical child that wishes she was anywhere but here. Bloomtown has employment, shopping, fishing, mysteries, folks who need help, gardening, and record collecting. Set in the 1960s, Bloomtown actually seems pretty fun with some decent stuff to do. More importantly, I love that despite having a day/night cycle with tasks taking up time during the day, there’s no deadline on completing dungeons or the main story.
Once in the dungeon there are shadows creeping the halls of whatever part of the Underside you’re visiting. They’ll chase you but if they’re facing away and you walk up to them, you can hit a button to engage in battle with them. Disappointingly, there’s no advantage or disadvantage to getting the jump in the overworld. It seems that no matter what, Emily’s team will always go first in battle. Because of this, battles can be little more than a nuisance later in the game. While early on, I felt like I was struggling to find my footing in bigger battles, battles where we had four and the enemy had four, towards the end of the game battles felt downright trivial. The weak/strong system borrowed from other combat systems works well but I have a bone to pick with how some of the spells work.
Out the gate, most of the spells offered to your team are simply applying status effects. Which, let’s face it, kind of sucks. I think using status effects more frequently and giving them weight is a good thing but I didn’t feel like that was happening here. Primarily, you can only have one status effect on you at a time. Some status effects combo with other status effects which is really cool. But any time you apply a status effect, the previous effect goes away. So if I spent time getting burn on all of the enemies so I could combo them with an all ice attack, and someone does a regular attack that applies stun, combo’s off. Some status effects only last a single turn, so if you’re trying to set up a combo with them and the person with the second spell is Emily, too bad. She goes first, always. A lot of these little things really dragged down the enjoyment of what should’ve been the star of the game.
As you form relationships with people around town, you can spend time with them in order to enhance your capabilities in battle. These enhancements really increased the triviality of battles by doing things giving Ramona a big chance to cleanse herself of negative status effects on her turn or giving Chester the ability to one-shot enemies on a regular attack. Others felt like they matched the battle system better, like Ramona’s ability to completely conserve SP on spell usage and Hugo’s counter attack if the enemy attacked him and missed. It felt like for every one thing that was right with the combat, there was another thing that felt wrong.
Despite my issues with the combat system, forming the relationships around town was nice. However, if the influences of Bloomtown were considered too wordy, Bloomtown itself might not be wordy enough. I appreciated some of the gravity with which they approached subjects like dealing with loss, but it all felt a little hollow. Things like Ramona’s father dealing with the loss of his wife in a very poor way resulted in fighting a demon version of him. While this is thematic, it was like turning on a light switch and really muddies down the reality that most of us live in. Yes, this is a fantasy world, but because it’s released it enters our cultural consciousness. The idea that someone is acting shitty to their child because they have a demon in them hand waives the actual hard work one would need to do in order to get out of that situation. Instead of Ramona’s father actually dealing with how his wife’s loss has affected him, he simply invites Emily and Ramona out for milkshakes.
Overall, the relationships made around Bloomtown might be skin-deep but are a nice little compliment to the seriousness of what’s happening around town. There’s a certain graveness that goes along with the librarian possibly being someone who is kidnapping children. However, it’s an easier pill to swallow when you’re helping Ruth try to contact aliens. Not all of the side-stories had levity but I was appreciative when they did as the main story was quite sobering. And let’s not forget that they gave you the best little Corgi to help you with your journeys and he has such a cute fuzzy face I just wanna give him a big hug.
I really loved the pixel-art in Bloomtown: A Different Story. The art itself was quite good but the real shine is in some of the animations. During combat, you can only attack the enemy directly in front of your party, any enemies behind must be shot at with a gun. Some of the animations for swapping over to the gun are absolutely phenomenal. Specifically, Chester, who wields two daggers, stabs them into the ground to pull out his rifle or shotgun, I’m not entirely sure which one he uses. Hugo’s animation is also quite good but primarily because it’s a bipedal dog with a rocket launcher. Along with the art, the battle music is a huge stand out. I couldn’t place it, but I believe there are four separate battle tracks and they’re all toe-tappingly great. Bloomtown is short enough that I’ll have the beats stuck in my head for weeks but won’t know any of the lyrics, sadly.
Finally, I have to highlight the enemy design in Bloomtown: A Different Story. The enemies in this game are some of the most creative enemy designs I’ve seen in a while. One of my favorites, Business Shark, is a fat shark with a jellyfish on his head like a hat, wearing a suit and holding a briefcase with papers falling out of it. There’s simplicity in the type of enemy you’re fighting, combined with a flair that is unmatched. The Bee is a support enemy so instead of having his stinger pointed at the group to attack or being big and beefy to tank the hits, he’s got a pair of hands on a walker to support himself. The Owlbear on defeat turns into a scared human that runs off. The enemy design in Bloomtown: A Different Story is one of the best things about the game.
Bloomtown: A Different Story was a great playthrough and I’m really glad I got the chance to play it. Some of the pitfalls in its design are very apparent and while some of the puzzle design and moment-to-moment combat wasn’t stellar, I think it’s overall a very worthwhile experience.
The Final Word
I think if you even have an inkling that Bloomtown: A Different Story is your jam, you owe it to yourself to try it out.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
