Blossom: The Seed of Life

Janky. Rough around the edges. Needs polishing, optimization and realization of potential. With that said, however? Blossom is an impressive achievement for what appears to be a solo development project. There's a lot of stuff to learn and discover, a lot of buildable machines to unlock, and some neat mechanics for tracing electrical cables and water hoses. Connecting things up is fun and satisfying, though you may get sick of it by the time the game is done. The visuals are nice, though some jank occurs with the rendering of trees and the animation of animals. The only way for Blossom, the cute li'l robot protagonist, to "lose" is to run out of backpack power and cease functioning. Her drop pod then prints a new body for her, who continues where you left off. Unless you're playing on Hardcore mode, I guess - then your entire playthrough of this 27-hour-ish game is over. Probably takes less time if you know what you're doing, but that's the time it took me to beat the Brutal difficulty. Not sure I recommend that either - it's a good challenge early on, but gets very, very grindy and repetitive later in the game. I guess the real trick is to lean into the automation systems very heavily, rather than do what I did and establish little temporary bases to get the rare resources that require heavy building-sized mining lasers to gather. Pro tip, in hindsight: Tier 3 mining drones can gather those, too. Though of course, you have to unlock them first. It's generally a good idea to unlock everything from a given terraforming track as soon as possible, I've found; the later tracks don't overlap or circle back much (for instance, unlike games like The Planet Crafter, raising the Heat level won't give you better Pressure equipment or vice versa), so... yeah. Make the number go up until each unlock tree says "finished". Story progress and unlocking the next terraforming element often happens before that, so don't go missing out on advanced vehicle designs by neglecting the buildup of atmospheric pressure while you're getting into heat generation. I do feel I should note some major areas in need of improvement: Rain, for starters. You reach the point where there's supposed to be weather, and... nothing. No visible rain. Sometimes, you point the camera at the sky, and you can [i]hear[/i] some rain, but you don't see it. Feels unfinished. Please amend. While spreading algae, the radius of the algae spreader buildings can overlap somewhat, which is odd, as there is a minimum distance between them. Anyway, the overlapping algae areas seem to get double-stacked with the greenish ground filter, making them extremely green and odd-looking. Animals were observed moving in stop-and-start, jerky fashion, or running on the spot. Trees are constantly popping in and out of rendering, looking like tall square rocks or something from a distance, and if that wasn't enough then they also pop in and out of shading; when you're close, they look pretty good, with some shadowed areas on the leaves. From further away, they are bright, flat color, which does not look good at all. Overall, the effect is to significantly decrease the game world's beauty and immersion. This is likely an optimization issue, and might be helped by... I don't know. Swapping more distant trees for sprite images of the properly shaded versions? Or just engaging the sorcery of people's GPUs in a more efficient way? Anyway, to end on a positive note, the game does contain a lot of beauty, and not all of it visual. There's a melancholic beauty in Blossom's internal monologues, as evidenced from pretty much every database entry; similarly, connecting to various bits of wreckage and habitat computers provides us with little pieces of the story of what happened to the original terraformation and colonization attempt. It's kind of fascinating, and again - told in a certain poetic (and very human) tone that I find refreshing amidst a sea of bland and uninspired writers. I get the impression that this game was made by someone who truly cares. About people, about nature, and about making the best game he could. I hope I'm right, because despite its current scuffed state, I'm going to recommend it; here's hoping the game will one day reach its full potential. And if not... well, there's a kind of beauty in imperfection, as well.