Admittedly, I knew next to nothing about Serenity Forge’s Fractured Blooms when I played it at PAX East. The more I learned, the more I was intrigued, as a time-loop horror story with an anime aesthetic hits a lot of targets for me. Even on the busy showfloor, I was impressed at how unsettled this demo had gotten me.
There was an intentionally slow pace to the gameplay of the Fractured Blooms demo, as it puts you in the role of a chronically fatigued young woman named Angie who seems to be stuck in some sort of time loop. You only have so much stamina per day, but Angie has to do a certain number of things to fix up her neglected house. This includes harvesting vegetables, planting new ones, making meals, and more.
Credit: Serenity Forge
All the while, Angie narrates what’s going through her head. Despite the seemingly pleasant surroundings and how relaxing the activities may sound, there’s a creeping sense of dread to all of the proceedings. You get noticeably more exhausted as you do simple things like picking tomatoes and planting seeds, and an eerie sensation seems to get stronger and stronger as you work yourself to the bone.
Fractured Blooms gets even stranger after you’re done in the garden, as you wander around the house to slowly get your dinner cooked. After a bizarre AI-esque character within a tablet told me to make stew for dinner, I looked around to find ingredients and, while doing so, noticed some peculiar little things that helped inform me about the situation Angie’s in. I liked that I had to time how long I cooked the stew perfectly without any visual indicator, as this added a surprising amount of tension to the simple act of cooking.
Credit: Serenity Forge
Fractured Blooms even makes doing the laundry tense.
Maybe the most tense part of the demo was when I was suddenly given two minutes to clean up Angie’s laundry from around the house before going to bed. As more time ran out, the timer would beep loudly, and Angie’s sight would get a bit more distorted. If that wasn’t enough, failing to do it before the timer ran out made Angie get less sleep, so when I woke up in an even scarier version of that same day, I had less stamina to finish the day’s tasks.
The dreary internal voiceover added another layer of melancholy to the Fractured Blooms demo, underscoring just how tired and depressed Angie is as she trudges through the (I assume not-so-mundane) tasks ahead of her. I get the vibe that this is the sort of game where you have an even better time when you know less about what’s happening before you play it, as the confusion I experienced cemented the idea that something just isn’t right.
Credit: Serenity Forge
Though I only played a small portion of Fractured Blooms, I was delightfully off-put by how unsettling everything was. I’m excited to see just how freaky the full game gets, as even this small snippet had me wanting to know just what was going on. There’s no set release date at this point in time, but you can already nab the demo off Steam, so I’d recommend you give it a shot if you’re into a slower sort of horror.
