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Just before writing this, I booted up Bloom for the last time. I hopped in, read the latest bits of story unlocked in the game, and promptly closed it without planting any new plants.
I feel like the only Playdate owner that hates Bloom.
Bloom is a visual novel/gardening sim by RNG Party Games. It has been touted as kind of THE game to sideload when you get a Playdate. It sounded nice, I like visual novels, I like gardening, and I love games that use a realtime clock. I didn't think twice about dropping $10 on it, it looked solid and everyone was gushing over it.
The first in-game day of Bloom made me tentatively interested. The game sets up the main story threads pretty quickly. I actually found the intro to be very cute. Our protagonist, Midori, has written a letter to her parents saying that she has dropped out of school to start a flower shop just like her grandma. She worries about disappointing them. But as the letter is written (with the player using the crank to progress the writing), she decides against it and it is deleted against the player's control. We're greeted with her apartment above the flower shop. Above the apartment is a rooftop garden that can be accessed with an elevator powered by the Playdate crank.
The gameplay of Bloom flows like this: while in your rooftop garden, you can plant flowers that will grow in real time, water them, and harvest them. The weather varies, so occasionally the rain will save you from having to water the plants. Cranking your way back down to your apartment, you have access to a cell phone interface through which you can buy plants, pay your rent (which increases your garden space on the roof), play some mini games, interact with a gacha system I never quite understood, and, most importantly, text friends and family. The text system unlocks new text after so much real-life time, and this is wher 99% of the game is. In fact, I primarily wanted to get the gameplay explanation out of the way, because outside of the text system, the rest of the game is not even worth bothering with. The gardening is mobile game levels of just logging in periodically to click on the flowers, there's really nothing else to it. It's not particularly hard to earn enough money to pay for your garden upgrades, so you will spend little time thinking about this after the first day. At some point I quit engaging with the garden entirely.
So, essentially what you are looking at is a visual novel. Our protagonist, Midori, texts her parents and keeps up the charade of being in college while having to carefully ask them for money as she falls on hard times in the shop. She texts her friend Tomoko about fairly basic things, arranging movie nights and whatnot. And more than anyone, she texts her girlfriend Ai about...well...
Before going further, I feel like I need to make it clear, I like visual novels. I have no problem with visual novels, and I'm not opposed to the "story told through text messages" format--I really liked this in The Missing, even though the gameplay of that game was not for me at all. But with all of that said, Bloom's story, which is all I really thing it has to offer as a game that isn't much of a gardening sim, has...almost no substance to speak of. I will admit fully, I did not finish it. Maybe it goes somewhere, I've seen at least one comment that it just sort of ends abruptly with no more messages. But I just can't take any more of it. As I've gotten older, I no longer have time for media I feel like I'm experiencing out of obligation.
The storyline presented in the opening letter writing sequence is fine. I did mildly want to see how things turned out with her parents. Presumably they find out that she has dropped out and started a store. There's at least some tension in this--although as some players have noted, the gameplay is a bit at odds with the story sometimes. It is incredibly easy to have already saved up a substantial amount of money by the time Midori asks her parents for money, which feels a bit awkward. But everything falls apart for me here, because I can't name a single other bit of conflict in the story I've seen up to the point I stopped. The texts are primarily just chitchat. Particularly a kind of twee chitchat that could be accurate for a mildly immature college kid but that I find incredibly offputting as a 32 year old. I guess in a way it feels like reading some actual college kid's texts.
Then we get to Ai, Midori's girlfriend, and I think here is where I went from not being into this game to actively disliking it. Midori and Ai, as a pair in a relationship, have not had a single worthwhile conversation in my time with this game. They don't discuss their feelings, they don't discuss anything of consequence at all. Most of their conversations can be summarized as "omg ilu bby" "omg ur so cute :3". You'd think with everything going on with the store and with Midori's parents, they might have a serious chat about it somewhere. But instead their time is spent sending :3 emojis at each other. And this is where I get annoyed. As a lesbian, I seek out media about lesbians, it's not too surprising. I didn't know Bloom fell into this category, but of course I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this at the beginning. But ultimately it has fallen into a kind of trope I hate. At this point in my life, I am done with lesbian media that consists of nothing but two young girls giggling and smiling at each other. I need substance. I need them to be fleshed out characters with lives and conflicts and emotions. Frankly, I've reached a point where I find a pair of young ladies doing nothing but sending emojis at each other borderline offensive. It feels like lesbians written by someone who watches too much anime. Which brings me to my next issue...
Bloom is ostensibly set in Japan. I say ostensibly because there's only two indications of this being the case: the fact that the currency is yen, and the fact that the characters all have Japanese names. But that's all. It feels like extremely lazy window dressing. All of the conversations sound excessively western, the worldview is western. The only media mentioned is parody names of anime popular in the west. But what really started to grate on me were the names. These are the kind of names you'd only pick for a kids show in Japan. The main character is Midori--Japanese for "green". Get it? Because she grows plants? At least she wasn't named Hana (flower) I guess. Her girlfriend, Ai? "Love". I suspect the "Tomo" in "Tomoko" is a play on "friend" as well since that's the only role she serves. It's so on the nose it's painful.
At the end of the day, I just found myself opening Bloom, reading a few texts, getting more and more annoyed, then closing the game. I quit gardening. It didn't feel like there was anything I was building up to that would make reading the inane dialogue worthwhile eventually. And the real time clock just prolonged this, I didn't want to wait another couple real world weeks to see if this was going anywhere. So I'm done. I'm done with Bloom. I'd rather play 50 30 minute games by first time developers than this sideload darling. To me it is the epitome of the "wholesome games" trend. At some point, "wholesome" shifted to meaning "without substance", and that's what I feel Bloom is. It has been compared to Lofi Beats, and indeed has all the substance of a pic of an anime girl at a desk. Bloom has nothing to offer me, so I'm done.
[html] Download Bloom on itch.io
(posted 2022-05-18, build version 1.0.8)