Fractured Blooms’ unsettling twist on the farming sim got to me. Not because it scared me—though it certainly did—but because it made me feel like I was losing my mind. Contending with forces beyond my comprehension, I tried my best to go through the motions of a normal day on the farm. But it took me too long to do my laundry, so I’m pretty sure I opened up a portal to Hell in my bedroom and planted a demon in my garden.
Yes, there’s something sinister beneath Fractured Blooms’ surface. I’d expect nothing less from the minds behind Slay The Princess. I tried to adjust to farm life during a hands-on demo at PAX East, but the voices in my head kept arguing.
The thing that stuck out to me about Fractured Blooms right away was its voice direction. As I wandered around the farm in first-person, plucking tomatoes from the vine and planting beets, the voice of the main character, Angie, walked me through what to do. But their voice wasn’t your usual video game performance. Instead, voice actress Nichole Goodnight brought this unsettling, abnormally whispery, deadpan tone to her delivery, accentuating every chill that shot down my spine.
And then, by the time I got used to that timid cadence, a new voice popped up outta nowhere. Bubbly and lively, this new voice taunted and talked over the clearly unwell Angie, goading me (her?) into planting flowers instead of beets and just generally making life hard.
This wasn’t the only way that the chunk of Fractured Blooms I played made otherwise mundane things feel confusing and unsettling. After I was done gardening for the day, I headed inside to make dinner and get ready for bed. I turned on the radio and asked my off-brand digital assistant what I should make for dinner, and got to it. But then my potted thyme plant started moving as I made multiple trips to grab different sprigs. And then, after finishing the recipe, I just set the table and headed upstairs for bed instead of tucking into the venison pasta dish. Weird!
One last chore before bed: laundry. Suddenly, a timer appeared out of nowhere, making this chore all the more stressful. I scrambled all over the upper floor of this empty, spacious farmhouse, noticing the strange shapes occupying beds but paying them no mind as I picked up hoodies and pants from the floor and ran them over to the open washing machine. I didn’t make it in time.
Running around like a chicken with my head cut off, scouring a bedroom floor for a balled-up hoodie with a timer ripped straight from a Mission: Impossible movie, counting down in the corner of my screen, turned this mundane task into something sinister and terrifying. I didn’t make it in time. Didn’t seem like that big of a deal until I woke up the next day.
It seemed like a Groundhog Day situation; the tomato plant already had fruit again, and my taproot had been unsewn. Here’s when the voices started arguing. The meaner, more energetic voice goaded me into planting a flower instead of beets, so I did.
All these tasks revealed something that might be frustrating in a game with less direction, as you can only hold one item at a time in the demo. But instead, developer Serenity Forge uses that limitation to create opportunities to frighten and disturb. Sure, it might be annoying to be reduced to only one item at a time in a normal farming sim, but Fractured Blooms is no normal farming sim.
As the days went on, things got worse and worse, with cosmic horrors growing out of my garden and appliances turning themselves on and off. After speaking with the game’s director, Z, it sounds like different decisions and outcomes (like getting my laundry done in time) would have led to a different outcome, but the horrors persisted as I continued to fumble my way through my time on the farm.
Fractured Blooms’ distinct style of sanity-testing horror offers a really cool spin on the usually saccharine farming sim. Cerebral and unsettling, I walked away from the demo excited to mess around with its Groundhog Day-like setup to see if Angie would escape the cycle… or succumb to madness. There’s a demo available now on Steam if you’re interested in exploring a piece of Angie’s psyche.
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