Fractured Blooms demo preview — Distortion, horror, and... chores?

Serenity Forge is a mammoth when it comes to subversions in the psychological horror genre, being home to classics like Doki Doki Literature Club and Slay the Princess, both incredibly influential games of their time. So, when they announced Fractured Blooms with its moe anime girl character trapped in a realistic Resident Evil 7 type house time loop, I was instantly interested. Like its predecessors, Fractured Blooms takes horror and blends it with other genres of video games. This time it’s the notorious cozy farming genre that has seen massive popularity in the 2020s. GamingTrend got early access to the demo which clocks in around 30-40 minutes and provides a taster of what Fractured Blooms will entail.

In this time loop horror you play as Angie, a brightly colored hair anime protagonist whose job is to go through the motions of mundane everyday life: tending to her garden, cooking, doing chores, and retiring to bed. That’s all we get of Angie’s life, with some brief and cryptic hints to a ‘He’ character and an empty family home with three bedrooms. You also have some environmental mysteries like a deserted school bus that she briefly comments on. You run through the cycles of chores with Angie’s thoughts narrated to the player, a lot of them referencing a sort of depression with how she struggles to maintain the house and do her chores. For example, whenever Angie decides to do the laundry, a timer is set and you have 2 minutes to run around the house and dump the dirty clothes in the machine so you can get enough sleep. It seems like there will be penalties if you slack in your chores as the leftover time on the timer equates to how many stamina points you have the next day. For example, I finished the chores with ten seconds left so the next day I got 3 stamina points. I can’t tell yet how they measure this, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. There’s already a lot of mystery and intrigue with these factors, but it only gets juicier as Angie descends into her next time loop.

Things start to change for the worse as Angie goes through the same motions, with a different voice intercepting her actions, persuading the player to do actions contradictory to what we did in the previous time loop. Meanwhile a  motif of red flowers and distorted spaces begin to swallow up the space as you struggle to complete chores within the time limit. The game does a good job in conveying tension and had me on my edge as I tried to carry out simple tasks like cooking dinner.

I’m very interested to see why other decisions were made in terms of the game’s design and presentation as it’s a very conscious decision to have a blatant anime character situated in a realistic setting.  As the camera pans out on her at the end of the demo, she is jarring and feels like one of those goofy mods for horror games – like Homer Simpson in Resident Evil 2 or something. However, this is Serenity Forge we’re talking about, so the juxtaposition obviously serves a purpose.

The demo overall was a great hook and despite the rather simple gameplay, its tone and mystery are signatures of its publisher, so I know I’m in for a wild ride – like hello one of the promotional images has a gun in it?? The experience relies heavily on sound, so I recommend playing this with headphones, the game is very atmospheric. Blending cozy with horror seems like the perfect choice and I can’t wait to see what’s to come with a promise of ‘multiple endings’ and a ‘redefinition of psychological storytelling’, very ambitious.

For all Fractured Blooms news, stay tuned to GamingTrend!