Iba con muchas expectativas con este juego, y me ha decepcionado bastante. La idea base es prometedora: una visual novel en tiempo real que ocurre en tu móvil mientras gestionas una tienda de flores. Desgraciadamente ambas mitades del juego están totalmente desconectadas: por ejemplo, hay un momento que hay una conversación en la que protagonista está agobiada por temas económicos mientras tienes la cuenta del banco llena. O en otro momento hacen falta unas flores, pero esas se consiguen sin necesidad de que tú las tengas que plantar.

Además las dos partes de juego tienen sus problemas. Las sección de gestión de plantas es extremadamente simple, no hay mucho más que hacer que comprar las semillas más caras y plantarlas. Por otro lado la parte narrativa tiene también fallos de bulto: no funciona bien lo del tiempo real (puede ser que tu personaje se vaya a dormir a las 11:00am) y la protagonista muchas veces toma decisiones que el juego no se esfuerza en explicar (hay una parte en el que decide hacer ghosting a otro personaje y llegué a pensar que estaba ante un bug y la trama se había quedado pillada).

Al final Bloom llega al aprobado raspado gracias a una escritura muy buena (me encanta como usa la forma de escribir como un recurso narrativo más), unos personajes bastante adorables y que estéticamente es interesante (muy lofi hip hop girl vibes).

Ojalá el estudio retome en algún momento la idea base del juego y la pueda llevar a buen puerto, porque creo que hay mucho potencial desaprovechado en Bloom.

This is a difficult one for me to review, there are things that love about Bloom but I also had many issues with it.

Firstly, the things I liked - the games atmosphere and style are great, they are clearly going for a sort of lo-fi chill mood here and they absolutely nail it. The pixel art looks fantastic on the Playdate, the two areas in the game are beautiful and I love the way little parts of it change depending on what's going on in the world. The way you interact with the game world, through the character's phone essentially, is an interesting choice and gives the game a sort of voyeuristic feel - you aren't really playing as the main character, rather it feels like you're spying on her through her phone. There are moments in the story where this dynamic caused me some anxiety, and I think this was deliberate and effective. The side activities on the phone are also quite fun, the little asteroids game is great and the collectible figures are again very detailed and charming.

The characters are generally quite memorable, and there are some nice little story arcs that play out throughout the narrative. I felt like the post-game story was a lot better in this regard - it didn't feel like it was trying to create any conflict or tension, just a pleasant slice of life.

Now, for the negatives - the flower "farming" portion of the game is so trivial as to be almost pointless. From what I could tell there is no strategy at all - you unlock more valuable flowers as the story progresses, and there is no point planting anything other than those.

The amount of money you accrue also reaches comical levels, with "rent payments" big enough to buy entire mansions by the end of the game. There is lots of scope for a more rewarding system here, like needing to maintain a steady supply of each flower, or weather conditions affecting what you can grow. The rent payments didn't really even need to change that much, it could have just been that you need to keep paying the same amount instead of the ludicrously ballooning costs.

In terms of the text messaging, you are presented with a choice of what to say for every message - but it became clear early on that this has no effect at all on the events of the game. I'm quite sure that most if not all of your responses don't even affect the response you get, as many times I felt like the response I received was a better match for the option I didn't pick. The "illusion of choice" here is barely an illusion at all, there might as well just have been a "progress dialog" button instead.

Finally, this one is a bit more personal but the main story wasn't all that satisfying for me. I will discuss the story very broadly here, I don't think it constitutes spoilers but you may want to stop reading if you are extremely spoiler-averse!

I felt like the main character made many poor decisions, but never really suffered any meaningful consequences from them or learned any lessons. She came across as dishonest and self-absorbed, and in the game she never really deals with any major fallout as a result of this.. things just kinda solve themselves around her. The story also sets up various potential plot points that just never really pan out at all. In a sense I think this is quite true to real life, many people do act like this and lots of things just happen with no consequences - but as a story everything just ends up feeling somewhat pointless.

I completed the main story but have yet to return for the free expansion content. This game has some fantastic things going for it: a relaxing soundtrack, great art, and a lovely phone interface in which the story is told. But ultimately I found it a struggle to remember to play every day, which is not a good sign for this kind of game. The farming-sim elements are very light, and the story was just barely interesting enough to keep me going (yet I hardly remember any of it almost a year later). But I was most disappointed by the disconnect between the story and the game mechanics, as what you are doing as a player rarely matches what Midori is describing in her life to her friends via text.

Although the game wasn't for me, I am very grateful for what this dev team was able to accomplish so early in the Playdate's life. They truly set the bar for others to match in terms of polish and quality.

Cute, sweet little game. Not much to it, but I enjoyed my time with it. The romance between the two main characters was understated in an honestly pretty sweet way - it's nice having a game about characters who are already in love instead of focusing on the "will they / won't they" sometimes.

I'm a sucker for incremental games, and while this is a very simple one, it still got its hooks in me for awhile. I see what they were going for with "growing flowers" and "story about a struggling flowershop owner" as the two halves of the game, but they don't really thematically connect. When I reached the scene where the main character begs her parents for money, I felt immediately taken out of the game because I had more money than I was able to spend at that point. Likewise, when she experiences the financial crush of the parents demanding the money back, I would have been able to pay it back without even thinking about it. It doesn't seem like the pacing of the incremental game portion was really considered; the way it communicates elements of the main character's life doesn't fit in with the story at all.

I feel like this suffers from the "fanfic syndrome" where "Japan" is functionally America with a couple cliched cultral details sprinkled on top. It's not clear to me why this was set in Japan to be honest; aside from zoning that let you put a flower shop, apartment, and rooftop garden in a single building, nothing felt especially Japanese about it.