A cross between Persona, Stranger Things, and Stardew Valley tells a cosy story of demonic invasion and allotment maintenance.
In a world that increasingly seems to be at war with itself, cosy games offer a nice way to escape for a few hours. Often presented in nostalgic 16-bit style, harking back to the good old early 90s, they tend to be about friendship, farming, and café ownership, offering a little respite from all the gunfire and stabbing of more conventional video game genres.
Bloomtown: A Different Story’s setting and style are cast from exactly that brand of cosy, recalling the top-down views of early Zelda games, in a tale of children playing detective. It stars Emily and her younger brother Chester, whose single mum needs a summer to concentrate on work and sends them to stay with their mildly eccentric grandpa in the countryside. It’s a set-up fans of Gravity Falls will recognise instantly.
Emily takes a job at the grocery store, to earn a bit of pocket money, and they meet a group of local children who say their friend’s missing, in what initially appears to be a game of hide and seek that’s gone on too long. In fact, she’s fallen victim to dark forces more reminiscent of Bloomtown’s other key influence: Stranger Things.
Where that gave us The Upside Down, Bloomtown has the Underside, which is considerably less unsettling but is still home to plenty of demons and colourful monsters you’ll need to fight. That happens in a series of turn-based battles that borrow wholesale from Persona, although lacking some of that series’ more mind-bending complexity.
The resulting blend is a mock 90s role-playing game with modern sensibilities, a sense of humour, and child characters forced to take responsibility when the adults around them fail to spot the dangers that lurk not so much in their town, as parallel with it. So, in the conventional world you’ll be stacking shelves in the mini-mart, and gently trying to con the museum into accepting Chester’s artwork, while also battling unseen forces of evil.
Naturally, your youthful protagonists have to be in bed by 10pm, so that means structuring your days around earning money, visiting the gym to increase Emily’s hit points, or going to the library to follow up leads. Then in the afternoon you have time to infiltrate the Underside, to battle demons and rescue the hapless regular folk they’ve managed to kidnap.
There’s always more to do than time allows, the game encouraging you to try a bit of horticulture in grandad’s back garden, growing crops you can then use in the kitchen to cook up meals to restore hit and magic points after battles. Or you can craft gadgets and lockpicks, read, solve crossword puzzles you find strewn around town, play the lottery, or exchange equipment at the pawn shop. Is there a fishing mini-game? As if you need to ask.
Many activities you complete increase your stats for smarts, charm, guts, and proficiency, which govern your abilities in problem-solving, charisma, ability to stand up to adults, and how often you succeed at mechanical tasks. You’ve got a similar clutch of numbers for combat skills. Each character also has a personal demon that they use to cast spells in battle, just like Persona.
These upgrade as you level up, but you can also entrap demons you’ve downed, adding the rarer, more powerful ones to your team roster, and sacrificing punier varieties to strengthen those you keep. It gives additional flexibly to your party, which is made up of Emily, Chester, their neighbour Ramona, and an unexpectedly garrulous talking dog called Hugo.
As part of your daily activities, you can spend time with each of them, which along with unlocking chunks of their backstories, also gives you new abilities, adding powers to help you combat the forces of darkness. It’s a great system, and adds to the broad range of attractions that compete for your time every day, giving the constant impression that days are just too short to fit everything in.
We regularly neglected our gardening duties by accident, returning to planters full of dried up dead things, a process eerily evocative of our house plants’ real life. It’s also relatively easy to misunderstand the game’s sometimes subtle pointers, resulting in a few in-game days spent aimless grinding the gym, grocery store, and lottery stand until you stumble across whatever you missed.
In terms of flaws, there are a few typos in the otherwise excellent dialogue and the game can be a touch finicky about where you’re positioned to water a plant or open a door. There are also moments when your gaggle of party members get in the way of objects, the single context sensitive interaction button triggering a needless chat with them rather than activating the MacGuffin you’re attempting to focus on.
In general though, the game’s a delight, the fast travel automatically streamlining itself around where you need to be for any given objective, while conversational choices are amusing and come with direct consequences when you decide to lie or steal – something you’re given the opportunity to do, with the outcome dependent on a die roll and the stats you’ve been nurturing.
Bloomtown: A Different Story offers a wry, modern take on faux 90s role-playing, weaving a coherent story and set of battle mechanics from its multiple, disparate influences. Its 16 rating for ‘strong violence’ is another one of those PEGI decisions it’s hard to reconcile, although it does include abductions and an emotionally abusive relationship, albeit delivered in adorable pixel art style.
Despite these background themes, Bloomtown remains warm and engaging, its generous levelling process and story proving pleasantly addictive and very… cosy.
Bloomtown: A Different Story review summary
In Short: A modern 16-bit role-playing with inspirations that range from Stranger Things to Persona 5, with elegant turn-based combat and a knowing wink to the genre’s more established tropes.
Pros: Fun plot and a setting that seamlessly incorporates cosy and spooky elements, while fully acknowledges that its characters are children, even as it has them solving crimes and conducting unexpectedly wholesome drug-running for a local doctor.
Cons: Some of the interactions are a bit pernickety, with its single action button often seeming insufficient. Text only conversations and knowing 1990s style may put some off.
Score: 7/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: Twin Sails Interactive
Developer: Lazy Bear Games
Release Date: 24th September 2024
Age Rating: 16
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