Bloomtown: A Different Story Steam Charts & Stats

Bloomtown is a good jrpg for a relatively decent price. It's got fantastic music and surprisingly deep combat mechanics, as well as a cast of lovable characters. The story looks soft and happy on the surface, but is extremely dark underneath. The downside is it goes way too quickly back to happy after seeing some truly vile scenes. It's got a 13 hour day system, but the calendar is unlimited; you could have as many days as you want to to complete the game in it's entirety. There are some bugs with some questlines not properly finishing, some items mislabeled in the end game, and the music can occasionally stop looping, however none of it stops any of the game play, all the quests are fully completable still, and none of the achievements can bug out (some can still be missed however). All in all I think it is worth it, especially if you can snag it for a 25%-50% off.

This game is just fantastic. Really had fun playing this one. If you're a fan of RPGs, slice of life stories, and/or the paranormal, this one is right up your alley.

i cant recommend this game enough. game play is great, theres a great sense of humor, and the combat is hard enough to make things interesting 10/10 in my book

The game is fun. I love the graphics and story. It does feel like some life skills progression are way easier than others, but I'm not complaining since I just want a chill game.

If the trailer sparked any interest, this game is going to deliver everything you're expecting and do it well. You don't need to worry too much about the time management if you don't want, it gives you as many days as you want for each story quest. It's got a decent time management setup if you do want to try to minimize the days though. My only complaint is the absolutely terrible interface for the map and fast travel. I'm not sure how you screw up a map interface this badly in 2024.

This game still has some bugs (which from the looks of discussion boards, are here to stay) and let's you sell quest items that have multiple functions (so apples are food, but can also be quest items, even while on the quest, you can sell the items). Additionally there is a lot LOT that there tutorial, as hand holdy as it seems at first, doesn't cover. Can't currently recommend unless you can get it for less than ten bucks, if that. Has strong Persona and Stranger Things (over vs under, kids in peril, etc) vibes.

A hidden gem I didn't expect to love this much I picked up Bloomtown on a whim during a sale for $12, not knowing what to expect—and honestly, I was blown away. It’s charming, cozy, and full of heart. I’ve fallen in love with the gameplay, the world, and the overall vibe. This game easily feels like it’s worth $30 or more. I would’ve happily paid full price and still felt like I got a steal. I genuinely appreciate the devs not only for crafting such a lovely experience but also for making it accessible with such a fair price point. I truly hope to see more from this team in the future. If you're even slightly curious, Bloomtown is absolutely worth your time.

Pros: - Fun turn based combat system. - Elements that are more interesting than classical 4. - Interesting story. - Gorgeous pixel art. - Catchy battle music. - A pretty interesting life simulator. Cons: - Lack of clarity on exact chances and damage numbers. - Some mechanics seem a bit lacking (like gardening). - Feels like there's a bit too much randomness with leveling. - Bosses being immune to all conditions make boss battles very boring. - A bit hard to build all around good squad (even by the end of game).

I thought I was going give a positive recommendation for a lot of my time with this game. TLDR: a lot of good moments trapped in a very badly constructed game. The Good: - Stellar art and music. If I had just seen the pixel art/animations and soundtrack for this game in a vacuum I might have guessed they belonged to goty material. - The "demon subduing" gameloop is pretty fun when it gets going. Hit demons with super-effective damaging spells to "down" them, then roll with a social stat to subdue (catch) them, then fuse them (sacrifice a demon to level up another), and try to get more type coverage across your party to down more demons. Its almost exactly the balance I want from a monster-capture game. - The game is pretty forgiving with the time-management system. The Bad: - The writing and dialogue are extremely lackluster. Part of this is explicit pacing and railroading problems, but part of it is that there just isn't enough good/funny/interesting writing work to justify how dialogue-heavy the game is. - The game is inconsistently opaque with a lot of it's systems and important information. You can see your combat stats on a status screen, but the game doesn't tell you what each stat does. The game often asks you to pick which social stat to give a free boost, but the game doesn't tell you how high each social stat is (outside of when you're testing them or leveling them up individually) so you often don't remember which stat needs a boost. To be clear- there are very good hardcore-type games that force you to take notes as part of the challenge, but here I felt challenged [i]by accident[/i], because of clumsy game design. - The game puts a lot of barriers between you and the demon-subduing system. Part of this is that you need demons in order to catch demons (and starting the cycle is finicky), but also it's just another way in which the game just doesn't give you information. The game tells you "You need to use super-effective spells in order to down demons to subdue them" but doesn't tell you that you need [i]damaging[/i] spells, not the elemental status spells that make up most of your starting tools. You need to maximise the type coverage to increase your chances of catching demons, but the game doesn't let you know what spells your "guardians" (the always equipped demons, that each party member has in addition to the demon equip slot) have, so it's easy to double up on one element while not having another. It's just frustrating. - The game feels unfinished. There are multiple interact-able spots where the protagonist says "I should come back here later with a friend" or "maybe I can open this door when grampa trusts me", but then there just. Isn't a followup on that. There's also greyed out "gift" option for each party member, but there is no gifting system implemented in the game at all. - Connected to the game being unfinished, there are also a number of glitches that were extremely frustrating. Most notably, partway through the third chapter I ran into a bug that almost softlocked me out of completing the main quest. - Lack of NPC diversity. I counted one black character (who has maybe 4 unique dialogue lines), and everyone else in the town appears to be white. I can't speak on how diverse a medium sized (?) town outside of chicago should be in the 1980s, but it's still feels weird and worth commenting on. More subjective comments/gripes/experiences: - The game seems to invite Gravity Falls comparisons, but suffers for them tremendously. Oh, so there are two brown-haired siblings going to a small(er) town for the summer to live with their older male relative? And they link up with a cool redhead girl (who is sortof a romantic interest for the protagonist but not really) and get involved in lots scary magic, culminating in them freeing a powerful demon who they then defeat in a climactic battle? Cool, so does it have any of the excellent writing and jokes that made Gravity falls good? No? Well now I'm more disappointed with this game than I would have been otherwise. - The game has 3 and 1/2 chapters, and I ran out of side-content (side-quests and stat increases) half way through the third chapter. I'm not even sure if this counts as criticism, because the fact I ran out of content meant that I was definitely engaging with that content, if nothing else. Still a little annoying. - A lot of authority worship and being nice to cops. Not sure how subjective this is because while it's a real criticism, a lot people will probably enjoy the game despite it. Two of the four friendship quest-lines end with you making an effort to be nice to a police officer (who is not the actual friend/party member you're trying to spend time with). A lot of the non-magical problems involve getting the legal authorities involved and those authorities fixing those problems without issues, which feels unrealistic, especially for the cold war era. - I did enjoy the final stretch of the game a lot, despite it having the same writing problems the rest of the game had. There are some kinda branching paths for the endgame, and I liked what they were trying to do with them.

I really, really wanted to like this, because I absolutely loved Persona and think turn-based games have been unfairly sent out to pasture. Sadly, though, I can't bring myself to finish it. - Playing the game feels like all the elements of gameplay exist on their own, independent of one another. As an example, your life skills or whatever they're called (Knowledge, Guts, Charm, etc.) have vastly different speeds of progression. - There isn't a sense of time urgency like in Persona, so if you want to run a week or two or more of your part time job, make more money than god, and buy all the best gear before the first dungeon, you can totally do it. I did, and the first dungeon boss was an absolute joke. - Speaking of Persona, too many elements were lifted identically to feel like a fresh take. Lucifer's room being where you manage and merge demons, equipped demons giving different abilities, the effing television shopping... - I really hate even saying this, because I'm 1000000% for representation in games, but there are so many niche / minority character details interwoven into one incoherent mess that instead of feeling inclusive, it feels like the ass-end of a conservative joke designed to crap on the left. "12-year-old Native American girl main character and her comic-book-obsessed edgy little bro team up with an immortal talking corgi (which feels like the dev's way of copying Morgana without copying Morgana) and a pink-haired lesbian illegal immigrant go do stuff with a not-very-nuanced social commentary woven in at various points." It's like they're putting a sign on their back that says "kick me" with salivating, troglodytic, conservative, IQ-smaller-than-shoesize bullies standing 5 feet behind. It feels like cannon fodder for shitty people to poke holes in a legitimate issue. Overall, I started to get bored. While some of the side content seemed somewhat interesting and entertaining (I did talk to mushrooms without being high and became a drug dealer for old people), very little felt consequential outside of the dungeons, which apparently there's only 3 of and most of your time is spent outside of them. I can respect the dev's obvious taste in games and their desire to create something of their own that matches those tastes, but it lacks enough originality to remain captivating. With games like this, you hope for stuffed lobster ravioli with alfredo. Instead, we got spaghetti without sauce.