reviewed Bloom
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.
