At this years PAX West, we got a chance to try out Serenity Forge’s (Doki Doki Literature Club! and Slay the Princess) newest title, Fractured Blooms. Dubbed a “life sim”, Fractured Blooms is trying to blend cozy life-sims with horror.
After our hands-on with the event demo, we were able to have a chat with Zhenghua (Z) Yang, CEO and founder of Serenity Forge, and talked about Fractured Blooms, some of Z’s inspirations for this upcoming title and the horror found in the mundane.
T-ONO: Thank you very much for having the time to talk with us today. I had the pleasure of trying out Fractured Blooms, and I've played Slay the Princess, and we played Doki Doki Literature Club! and so we're fans of Serenity Forge’s brand and these types of games.
Can you tell us a little bit more about Fractured Blooms, and if anyone who's never really heard about this new title, what is something for them to expect when they're getting into this type of game?
Zhenghua Yang (Z): Fractured Blooms is a farming sim, life sim, cooking sim. A little cozy on the surface, but then a kind of psychological horrifying a little bit slightly below that surface. But actually the truth is, the game is a lot more than that. I mean, even beyond a demo, there's so much more that you haven't seen yet, so it's a game that it's really all about a kind of subversion, kind of raising the voices of those who are all not heard.
T-ONO: That's something I can really attest to because I would say foreboding was the best word I can describe when playing this game; that there was something under the level or underneath the surface of every single step I took while playing. Personally, I'm a big fan of the cozy sims and the farm sims, and so like, what gave you the motivation and desire to try to put these two genres together that haven't really been seen so much so far?
Z: I'm a big fan of farming sims as well, and actually, a major part of the inspiration for the game comes from real life. I love gardening, I love cooking and you know, I have a bunch of plants in my yard, and I just really love taking care of them and day to day I’m very inspired by kind of going through that process. One of the really interesting parts about horror games is that, if you think about the early days, horror games, like Resident Evil, right? These games are less like the games that you see today and more like a resource management game. You're managing your inventory, you're managing herbs and bullets and guns and everything, right?
I grew up with a lot of those horror games, and I was kind of thinking about horror games in general, how it works. How resource management works in horror and what is your pinnacle of resource management while in farming and life and cooking sims, right? Why don't we try to put the two together and see what we get, and what we end up getting ends up being this thing that is sometimes speaks in comfortable ways because of the cozy and farming sections, but then sometimes speaks to you very horrifying, nuanced, subconscious ways that maybe tickles parts of your brain that you didn't even know existed.
T-ONO: Yes, that's one thing I have noticed too is because it just seems like there's a bit of horror in the mundane of things, and like when playing the demo that you go there, you just pick the vegetables, you water the seeds just planted, you make dinner and then when you start going through that loop, things get more and more, like I said earlier, foreboding and there’s something underneath the surface.
One question I have particularly about just the demo itself. I personally didn't do really well at it (Laughs). Trying to find everything for the cleaning up and your chores section, like putting things in the laundry. I did bad the first night; I did horrible the second night. If I did better, would that have led to a different kind of path or experience in the demo itself?
Z: The demo that you played is very much built for events, you know, like in the game, like a farming sim, if you're a farming sim player, you know, I mean, we didn't want to keep you here for 5 hours just, you know, standing there and farming the whole time. So we stripped out a lot of the farming, the cooking, you know, everything was very streamlined. In the final game, the game is going to have a lot more of a system, a lot more of those mechanics making choices on how you invest your stamina and energy, how you spend the limited time you have to be able to go into that next loop.
The game that you're playing here is a lot more streamlined, obviously, to keep a shorter experience, and then the final game is going to be a lot more fleshed out where there's a lot of different endings, The game is going to really remember a lot of the choices that you make, and it's going to shape a lot of how the world is and also even yourself.
T-ONO: I'm a really big fan of Slay the Princess and just the multiple pathways of that narrative. And as I was playing, I was thinking that kind of same thing. Is this going to lead to some multiple pathways and different narratives and different things that I can bring out from the lore. Because even with this quick 40 minutes I was playing with Fractured Blooms, it really just sucked me in with just the overall atmosphere and the desire to learn more about the main character, like who is she talking to?
Who is “He” that she keeps on talking about? And then like the random little pictures and things left over from the house after it gets reset, it's really interesting, and I really like that concept that you have with the home. One thing that I also would like to ask you about is that I was really, really intrigued about, I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who's listening that might play this demo, but there is that period of time in the second loop where you're cooking, and then something happens, and I was like, “Oh I gotta turned this thing off” and I forgot to turn off the stove, messing everything up, and it kind of led more to like that, just anxiety of things.
I don't know about you, but when I play cozy games, there is also this weird level of anxiety that is a part of something like, Stardew Valley, where I'm like, “oh I gotta make sure I have to minmax every single thing.” Was that something that was really integral to the design of this game? Is that something you're going to try to see more of when trying to input horror levels into that kind of cozy sim aspect?
Z: Yeah, absolutely. When I started the interview, I said that this game is a life sim, and I really do mean that, you know, life is not just all cozy and wonders, right? Stardew Valley, on some levels, is not really that accurate of a life sim, right? It is more of a kind of an escape of life.
T-ONO: And maybe kind of a spreadsheet manager of sorts.
Z: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I love the game. It makes you feel great, you know, this game kind of looks at life sims, and think about like, what if we really hit at home? You know, what if we really think about the world that we live in, the people of who we are? The state of the society that we reside in? And kind of build a simulation off of that and include all of the beauties of it, but as well as maybe some of the horrors.
T-ONO: Well, excellent, I know some of our fans would be really interested in what kind of inspirations you got to make this game, especially in things like anime and manga. Is there anything in particular that you are kind of tapping in when you're trying to think about with Fractured Blooms?
Z: If it's not obvious yet, you know, the artist for the game, Satchely, she's also the artist for Doki Doki Literature Club!, and made a lot of this kind of mentality of subversion is a big part of what this game is. I mean, I'm a big anime fan myself, and I also feel like there's kind of this world that we're getting into where you're kind of blending a lot of the styles, right? It's not just like here's the weird anime fans and then here's the normal people, right? Like, our world is now kind of coming together. Games like Genshin Impact actually are hugely inspiring for this game. We have some artists that worked on Genshin Impact that are now working here at Serenity Forge and this title, so a lot of those kinds of elements are pretty big.
Another part of it is kind of like what if we bring some of the styles together? There's a Japanese artist who is actually a huge inspiration of mine. His name, I believe goes by Hoshibackyard, which is kind of this anime styled characters that reside in a photorealistic world type of illustrations that he does, and it's very, yeah, very inspiring for me and some of his illustrations, literally like, made it click for me and kind of create this world, like overnight, basically.
T-ONO: Excellence! Well, I think I would like to wrap up with two questions, the first one would be, when do you expect to see a release of Fractured Blooms?
Z: We just started this game not too long ago. We actually started the development about February of this year, and the build that you played was only about two and a half months into development, so it's very early still. We're a small team, but we do work quick. We're hoping to be able to release some more information about that soon. We do plan on polishing up the demo here and hopefully releasing that into the public in the near future here. But yeah, overall, that's kind of our trajectory.
T-ONO: Well, actually, you answered my second question because I know that a lot of our fans would love to get ahold of the demo and play this as soon as possible. So hopefully, we'll be seeing something of a playable demo in the next couple of quarters or so, hopefully. Fingers crossed at least.
Z: You know, it should be a lot sooner than that, actually. I mean, you're trying it out, it's almost there. We just want to make sure to add a little bit more polish to the rough edges, but beyond that, it’s just making sure that people are aware that this is an event demo and not really a systems demo that the game's really about. Otherwise, we're really excited to start sharing it.
T-ONO: Lastly, can you just tell us for people listening where they can find information about Serenity Forge and about Fractured Blooms, and anything else you want to tell our fans before you finish up our interview today?
Z: Absolutely, the best way to find us is obviously our website, serenityforge.com. You can also check out Fractured Blooms and wishlist the game on Steam, which an easy way to go there is to just go to fracturedblooms.com and then it kind of goes there directly right now.
Check out our website. It has all the links to our socials. We're pretty much @SerenityForge across all the socials. If you want to follow me directly. I'm also on social media, just @ZhenghuaYang, which is my full name, and you'll be able to find me.
T-ONO: Thank you very much for talking with us today, and I really hope that the development goes very smoothly. I hope a lot of people get try out Fractured Blooms because, I can honestly say this is one of the most interesting things I played here at PAX this year. Thank you very much!
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