SmashPad (@smashpad.bsky.social)

REVIEW – “Blossom: The Seed of Life” is a cute survival game that actually ends if you want it to Survival games have been a huge genre in the industry that gets a lot of attention for being a sandbox of creativity and resourcefulness, where you explore a world that has existed before you arrive and will be the same long after you’re done. It's how most survival games tend to operate. Blossom: The Seed of Life takes a bit of a different approach, as you are a cute robot tasked with reviving this dead world that resembles Mars — everything around you is red, dusty, and barren as you try to bring life back to the world. It’s not a survival game intended to be endless, or a blank canvas with which you can build out a creative existence doing whatever you want, instead of the goals that are laid out for you. It’s a game with a story that unfolds in these notes you’ll find at various places around the map, which gives you an idea of how this world ended and your role in bringing it back to life. Blossom has an ending you should eventually reach, which feels like a rarity for the genre that tends to be designed to be your forever game. Being made by a solo developer certainly makes this quite a remarkable project with some clear limitations related to the size of the team that made this game. When you first awaken, you’re a fragile robot that has a backpack with a big battery power meter on the back of it. The battery pack lets you know how close you are to running out at all times and has a few slots to store the elements that can be mined from the surface of this dead planet. The backpack clearly was inspired by Astroneer’s backpack, with both the battery meter and inventory slots on it, though it also influenced the home base-style spaceship that you’re building out from during the game. You don’t really do any planet-hopping like in Astroneer, as you stick to this map with a couple of cool moments. One of them has you returning to the space station that acts as a good buffer between major phases of the game, when your next moves are pretty clear to ascertain from what you find on the station. I would say Blossom is the sort of survival game where you progress through it in phases, which might be the best way to describe how linear a survival game it is. The first phase involves you getting the hang of what’s going on as you venture out to gather elements you need to upgrade yourself, make new machines and stations for your crafting and gathering needs, and learn how to recharge your batteries and power everything you’re building around you. This game is a great personality test for how well you organize your electronics spaces because everything is powered with cables that must be attached to power sources, or to the machines that need that power distributed to them, which has some physics to them, so that they can wrap around things awkwardly when you take a weird route between devices. Unlike our reality, these cables can pull themselves taut, so there’s no extra slack hanging around. Luckily, any time you’re “holding” the power cable, it’s technically attached to the power slot on your robot’s chest, so you can charge yourself easily from any sort of power source that you see around yourself. https://smashpad.com/blossom-the-seed-of-life-review/