In Full Bloom has you take a gross little plant from garden nuisance to stellar cancer through a noisy, curious loop.
In an age where incremental games are getting bigger (no pun intended) and more popular, it makes sense that somebody should look back to the exponential growth at the heart of the Katamari games and tie them to the… exponential growth of certain species and organism. In Full Bloom’s creature, described by the developers as a baby, is a gross little mass of flesh that has an unending hunger. It feels as though it was built to both compel and disgust, with pathetic grunts as it stretches towards food, and hyper-realistic wet eating and digesting noises.
It is, of course, not the gross noises nor the rows of mangled teeth that are what keep people playing In Full Bloom. It’s the exponential growth, it’s seeing something large and dangerous crawling around you, then you realising twenty minutes later that it has now become the smallest thing you can see. It’s seeing a new, large object and not realising exactly what it was until later, when you are eating those houses whole. It’s a similar journey to Katamari, but it only goes in one direction and it keeps going in that direction – not resetting back between levels.
This means that In Full Bloom’s most interesting and rewarding moments are early on, as you break from the confines of the sandbox, or scale beyond the neighbourhood containing that same sandbox. If the compulsion to keep feeding your creature hasn’t got its hooked in, then you’ll be one of those players that dial out of it well before the first forty minutes of gameplay has passed.
Maybe it’s meant as commentary on exponential growth, or capitalism, or even the human condition, but whatever it is, it delivers a message about all of those things. All of that said, it doesn’t feel ambitious enough or replayable, and the greyscale artwork feels like a limitation rather than a choice. Over my many years I’ve played dozens of games about growing beyond the confines of the planet and destroying it in the process… maybe In Full Bloom will be somebody’s first experience of that, and they’ll remember it and reference it for years to come, but for me it doesn’t quite stand out enough.
In Full Bloom is available for PC.
