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.
The phases of this game correspond to the progress you’ve made in terraforming this world, which are tracked by a machine, as well as an overlay that you can craft early on. You clear the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from aimless mining machines before using heaters to warm up the world to fill up craters with ice and then water. From there, you’re using that water to improve the soil for growing plants after creating new seeds for a variety of plants, and then capping it off with the creation of animal life as you build towards the game’s finale.
You’re unlocking the machines to build with through this progression as you fill up meters on the terraform analyzer machine, which acts similarly to a standard battle pass as you meet certain milestones to unlock new blueprints to put in your printer so you can build them. The one issue with the blueprints is that the printer can only take one at a time before requiring you to move around and insert another one instead of just letting you input multiple in a row. That probably only makes sense as you play the game to see how it un-highlights the input slot every time you put them in. It’s another aspect of the game where it’s just janky enough to be an annoyance, but not enough of an annoyance to make me not want to bother with the game.
Blossom has a good pace for most of the game, which I’d call a cozy survival game, as the terraform analyzer’s meters just keep going as long as the machines you’re using are properly powered to give it a fun pace for the first half of the game. Once you need to cover the surface of the planet with algae matter to improve the soil for planting seeds, it starts to require some deliberate work that slows the game down a bit. That phase of the game requires building some things around at least a few of the lakes you’ve created that can take some time, especially once you’ve unlocked the rover and its wagons that can be outfitted with different modules for the various tools you’ll need. The cutest part is you unlock the wagons first, and they can be hooked up to your chest power slot, so they follow you around to give you extra storage, battery juice, and whatever other modules you want to equip to those wagons.
Where Blossom slows down the most are its last two phases when you’re creating plants in genetic machines where you combine two seeds you’ve made before to unlock the next seed, which is powered by a new material that you turn into carbon rods that can only be made with two different machines that can either slowly make carbon ores you craft into rods or the other machine that makes the rods themselves.
Both machines worked slowly enough that I’d just sit and wait for the ores and rods to be made, and then I could create seeds to combine into a new seed, which just progressed much more slowly than the prior phases. It was also a disappointment to have the seed combination process be less of a puzzle like I initially expected, so that added to how slow this phase felt. That slow pace doesn’t ruin the game at all, but it made the lack of anything else I had to do a bit of a downer. There are fewer plates to spin at this point in the game, so it’s easy to get tunnel vision of anticipating how long it’ll take to get to the end of the game.
The final phase with the creation of animal life is like the plants, but more tedious due to the whole process of how this last part of the game works. You build a genome machine to unlock new animals you can spawn that uses a new type of rod I hadn’t used before that unlocks them even more slowly than the plant machines, though it only requires keeping fueled to progress through all 32 creatures it’ll discover. The embryo machine you use to make those animals uses a new type of core that requires the other four to make, though my stupidity made this part of the game seem harder than it was. You put eight of those cores into the machine to fuel it and it’s the only machine that doesn’t require electricity or renewable fuel to run.
As those creatures are unlocked, you can spend your eight points on spawning new creatures that you have to shuffle around with new creatures showing up. This is the only phase where the terraform analyzer’s meter doesn’t fill up automatically. Each animal you spawn has a point associated with it and the last animals to be unlocked are worth the most. You can supposedly reach the end of the meter with just one of these machines, but I couldn’t figure out the right combo or process to do that and just made another embryo spawner to max it out.
Like I said earlier, none of this is all that bad; it’s just the tunnel vision you have when the end is in sight that it feels worse, and doing it for a review doesn’t help things.
Looking back, this was a nice and chill game to play and multitask with as you ride the linear progression from beginning to end. The only times I got frustrated were due to some points where I didn’t know how to progress due to some inelegant writing in the codex that doesn’t explain how some machines work, which ended up requiring some time to figure it out for myself.
The weakest part of the game is probably the controls, though in the sense that placing machines too close to each other involves some awkward moments where you think you’re using one and open up the interface for another. Your storage options for materials are all very hard to use with specificity. I’d have the auto storage machine drop items that just landed on the ground, and would make it hard to use the machine without picking them up first and dropping them elsewhere, since you could not break down items into their base parts.
Luckily, the first update the dev has put out since launch overhauls both of those things to seemingly fix how you interface with the various storage devices and add a recycler for breaking down items, so you won’t have leave all of the crap you no longer need on the ground around the base away from machines so they don’t interfere with what you’re trying to do. I have yet to try them out due to this update happening as I’m writing this, but that should be a good improvement over what I ended up doing for the last 10 hours or so of my playthrough.
I’ve also played a good bit of the game on my Steam Deck, which was also a good way to play the game, even with the obvious lower graphical settings it needs to run well. The game isn’t doing much to really need much more than what the Steam Deck can do. That said, my new PC ran it at about 60 frames per second for most of the game until I started the plant phase. The extra tall grass and various types of bushes and trees made a sizable hit to the framerate, so I was mostly at 30-40 fps without adjusting the settings.
Blossom: The Seed of Life is a nice crafting survival game where you only need to invest up to 30 hours to see it from beginning to end. It’s not a game that has much else to do besides the main goals it lays before you, though there are some habitat-building pieces you can find around the map for some extra things to build that serve no real purpose. There’s no multiplayer, and the only alternate modes are a creative mode and an easier survival difficulty if you need either of them, but the game isn’t built to encourage that stuff. Even the Steam achievements are all for things you’ll do in the main quest line, so you’ll easily get them all by beating the game. The developer seems to be quick to update and improve the game, so I’d be down for another playthrough if they add more content to the game at some point.
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.
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.
The phases of this game correspond to the progress you’ve made in terraforming this world, which are tracked by a machine, as well as an overlay that you can craft early on. You clear the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from aimless mining machines before using heaters to warm up the world to fill up craters with ice and then water. From there, you’re using that water to improve the soil for growing plants after creating new seeds for a variety of plants, and then capping it off with the creation of animal life as you build towards the game’s finale.
You’re unlocking the machines to build with through this progression as you fill up meters on the terraform analyzer machine, which acts similarly to a standard battle pass as you meet certain milestones to unlock new blueprints to put in your printer so you can build them. The one issue with the blueprints is that the printer can only take one at a time before requiring you to move around and insert another one instead of just letting you input multiple in a row. That probably only makes sense as you play the game to see how it un-highlights the input slot every time you put them in. It’s another aspect of the game where it’s just janky enough to be an annoyance, but not enough of an annoyance to make me not want to bother with the game.
Blossom has a good pace for most of the game, which I’d call a cozy survival game, as the terraform analyzer’s meters just keep going as long as the machines you’re using are properly powered to give it a fun pace for the first half of the game. Once you need to cover the surface of the planet with algae matter to improve the soil for planting seeds, it starts to require some deliberate work that slows the game down a bit. That phase of the game requires building some things around at least a few of the lakes you’ve created that can take some time, especially once you’ve unlocked the rover and its wagons that can be outfitted with different modules for the various tools you’ll need. The cutest part is you unlock the wagons first, and they can be hooked up to your chest power slot, so they follow you around to give you extra storage, battery juice, and whatever other modules you want to equip to those wagons.
Where Blossom slows down the most are its last two phases when you’re creating plants in genetic machines where you combine two seeds you’ve made before to unlock the next seed, which is powered by a new material that you turn into carbon rods that can only be made with two different machines that can either slowly make carbon ores you craft into rods or the other machine that makes the rods themselves.
Both machines worked slowly enough that I’d just sit and wait for the ores and rods to be made, and then I could create seeds to combine into a new seed, which just progressed much more slowly than the prior phases. It was also a disappointment to have the seed combination process be less of a puzzle like I initially expected, so that added to how slow this phase felt. That slow pace doesn’t ruin the game at all, but it made the lack of anything else I had to do a bit of a downer. There are fewer plates to spin at this point in the game, so it’s easy to get tunnel vision of anticipating how long it’ll take to get to the end of the game.
The final phase with the creation of animal life is like the plants, but more tedious due to the whole process of how this last part of the game works. You build a genome machine to unlock new animals you can spawn that uses a new type of rod I hadn’t used before that unlocks them even more slowly than the plant machines, though it only requires keeping fueled to progress through all 32 creatures it’ll discover. The embryo machine you use to make those animals uses a new type of core that requires the other four to make, though my stupidity made this part of the game seem harder than it was. You put eight of those cores into the machine to fuel it and it’s the only machine that doesn’t require electricity or renewable fuel to run.
As those creatures are unlocked, you can spend your eight points on spawning new creatures that you have to shuffle around with new creatures showing up. This is the only phase where the terraform analyzer’s meter doesn’t fill up automatically. Each animal you spawn has a point associated with it and the last animals to be unlocked are worth the most. You can supposedly reach the end of the meter with just one of these machines, but I couldn’t figure out the right combo or process to do that and just made another embryo spawner to max it out.
Like I said earlier, none of this is all that bad; it’s just the tunnel vision you have when the end is in sight that it feels worse, and doing it for a review doesn’t help things.
Looking back, this was a nice and chill game to play and multitask with as you ride the linear progression from beginning to end. The only times I got frustrated were due to some points where I didn’t know how to progress due to some inelegant writing in the codex that doesn’t explain how some machines work, which ended up requiring some time to figure it out for myself.
The weakest part of the game is probably the controls, though in the sense that placing machines too close to each other involves some awkward moments where you think you’re using one and open up the interface for another. Your storage options for materials are all very hard to use with specificity. I’d have the auto storage machine drop items that just landed on the ground, and would make it hard to use the machine without picking them up first and dropping them elsewhere, since you could not break down items into their base parts.
Luckily, the first update the dev has put out since launch overhauls both of those things to seemingly fix how you interface with the various storage devices and add a recycler for breaking down items, so you won’t have leave all of the crap you no longer need on the ground around the base away from machines so they don’t interfere with what you’re trying to do. I have yet to try them out due to this update happening as I’m writing this, but that should be a good improvement over what I ended up doing for the last 10 hours or so of my playthrough.
I’ve also played a good bit of the game on my Steam Deck, which was also a good way to play the game, even with the obvious lower graphical settings it needs to run well. The game isn’t doing much to really need much more than what the Steam Deck can do. That said, my new PC ran it at about 60 frames per second for most of the game until I started the plant phase. The extra tall grass and various types of bushes and trees made a sizable hit to the framerate, so I was mostly at 30-40 fps without adjusting the settings.
Blossom: The Seed of Life is a nice crafting survival game where you only need to invest up to 30 hours to see it from beginning to end. It’s not a game that has much else to do besides the main goals it lays before you, though there are some habitat-building pieces you can find around the map for some extra things to build that serve no real purpose. There’s no multiplayer, and the only alternate modes are a creative mode and an easier survival difficulty if you need either of them, but the game isn’t built to encourage that stuff. Even the Steam achievements are all for things you’ll do in the main quest line, so you’ll easily get them all by beating the game. The developer seems to be quick to update and improve the game, so I’d be down for another playthrough if they add more content to the game at some point.
by Chris Selogy
