• Price: $24.99 USD
• Developers: Different Sense Games, Lazy Bear Games
• Publisher: Twin Sails
• Release Date: September 24, 2024

A review code was kindly provided by Sandbox Strategies on behalf of Different Sense Games, Lazy Bear Games, and Twin Sails. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Content warnings: child abuse, abduction, murder, mental health issues,

I really enjoy turn-based RPGs, and it’s even better if there’s monster-taming involved. So I was excited to check out Bloomtown: A Different Story, a game set in 1960s America that meets the above criteria and adds social elements to the mix.

Brother and sister pair Chester and Emily are traveling to Bloomtown to stay with their grandfather for the summer due to some family issues. Naturally, they’re not thrilled with this decision, but there’s not much they can do about it.

They meet their surly grandpa, who puts them straight to work. (Because of course he does. 😔) When they finally get a chance to wander around town, they discover that kids have been disappearing. Emily finds herself in the Underside, a place where demons lurk, and stumbles upon the missing girl.

Emily dreamt that she made a contract with Lucifer to save Bloomtown; this agreement gives her the ability to subdue and command demons. But she’s not prepared for the big boss responsible for the abductions yet, so she must flee.

As she tries to find out more about the missing girl so she can return to the Underside to save her, Emily adds Hugo the talking corgi and local girl Ramona to the party (and Chester tags along, too). Somehow Emily’s contract seems to apply to the people – or pups – with her, and they can handle demons as well.

Our team investigates these phantasmal felonies in the real world and in the Underside. Exploring the Underside dungeons, you’ll have to solve some puzzles and fight demons to make your way to the end and finally catch the culprit for your current investigation.

Personally, I didn’t find most of the puzzles too difficult. There are quite a few that require math to advance, but I was never a math person and figured them out pretty easily. I had more of a hard time navigating areas like the second dungeon than I did with any of the puzzles.

When it comes to the combat, you won’t have to worry about random encounters as enemies appear on the overworld. There are a limited number of enemies in dungeons, but they respawn when you return to the Underside on another day. Only a handful respawn in the same trip if you go to different rooms and come back.

The game has 2 difficulty levels (normal and hard). I played on normal difficulty and didn’t find battles too challenging. Each party member has an unchangeable “guardian” demon, and they can equip one more demon to supplement their abilities.

As mentioned above, battles are turn-based. Emily and her friends all have a melee attack, ranged attack, and then magical abilities from their demons. You can easily check enemy weaknesses and use them against them; you need to hit every enemy’s weakness and “down” (temporarily incapacitate) all of them.

At first you won’t have much variety in terms of which elements you have access to, which is why it’s important to down demons and subdue (capture) them. Every single enemy has to be downed for the subdue command to appear. I did figure out that if I didn’t have the right spell for one enemy, I could defeat them and down the remaining demons to subdue them.

When you try to subdue a demon, you have to roll dice based on a percentage connected to one of your social stats (i.e. charm). If you fail you don’t get another chance with that individual demon in that battle, but you can still try to subdue one of the others.

I really like that we can subdue multiple demons in the same battle. We can’t subdue demons that are at a higher level, but that does make sense. My only real complaint about subduing demons is that we don’t get access to previous Underside dungeons, so if you forget to grab one of your favorite designs you can’t go back and get it after finishing that part of the storyline.

Your party members and their guardian demons will level up, and you can choose new abilities for the guardians at certain levels. For your secondary demons, you must rely on fusion to strengthen them.

Fusion doesn’t work the way you’d expect; here you take the base demon and sacrifice multiple demons to give it more experience and level it up. You don’t fuse demons and get a new demon as a result – it’s more like a sacrificial strengthening ritual than fusion.

I did wish they’d made it so we could have demons inherit skills from the sacrifices, but instead the demon has the chance to learn a new ability or gain a new elemental resistance after they level up through “fusion.” You might not get a new ability after fusing demons; I’d reload my save so I didn’t waste my limited stock of fusion fodder.

There’s a limit to how many abilities your demons can learn through fusion. The max level for your demons is 15, and I believe it’s the same for Emily and her team. Grinding isn’t really necessary, which I can appreciate.

I don’t remember seeing the door to the fusion center in dungeons, so unfortunately you can only level up the party members and their guardian demons while in the Underside. You’ll have to wait until you return home for the day to strengthen the secondary demons.

Gramps limits Emily and Chester’s adventure time by establishing a 10 PM curfew, so you need to head to the Underside before around 9:30. (You have as much time as you need once in the dungeons.) The good news is that the clock is fairly slow, and there are fast travel options in both the Underside and the real world.

I really appreciated how detailed the map was, as it marks your current position, the location of quest events, and allows you to fast travel to places and people. There’s a decent amount of activities in Bloomtown besides Emily’s main pastime (being a meddling kid).

At the beginning of the game you put some points into Emily’s social stats: smarts, charm, guts, and proficiency. They come into play in and out of the Underside. Even in social situations, your fate depends on the dice rolls. Are you charming enough to convince grandpa he said he didn’t want his change back? 💰

If luck isn’t on your side, you’ll miss out on an item or cash, so you’ll want to work on your social stats to get the most out of the game. Examine items and do good deeds such as watering a neighbor’s plants to increase your smarts or charm.

Reading books – purchased or borrowed from the library – will impact a different stat depending on the subject matter. It takes a few hours for Emily to finish most books; it might have been more interesting if they’d given us some excerpts from these books because we can only watch her read.

There are quite a few locations where Emily can sit and read for a few hours. You can read and craft useful items such as lock picks or fishing bait in her room. Tend to your garden every day and use the produce to cook healing items.

Money can be pretty tight at first, so you’ll want to work to earn some cash to spend on seeds or equipment. Apparently the main storyline doesn’t have a time limit, so you can spend more time building up your stats and funds.

Besides the main quest, you can also complete side quests for the residents of Bloomtown. Unfortunately, there is not a manual saving option; the game only auto saves for you. It’s possible to fail some quests and miss out on their reward due to poor luck with dice or the wrong choice.

Now, with clear inspiration from Persona, you’re might wonder if there are social links. And the answer would be yes – in a more limited capacity. Spend time with Chester, Hugo, Ramona, and another character, and get to know them better. Being antisocial in Bloomtown means missing out on great passive abilities that are extremely helpful in battle.

I really liked most of the writing. The kids’ points of view were often extremely entertaining, but they’re also capable of taking things seriously – which is necessary considering the severity of the crimes committed by the bosses in the game.

I think they rushed the ending because as soon as I finished the third and final dungeon they started a major event that leads to the end of the game. In my opinion, the situation with the third boss needed more closure. I also didn’t think that they resolved the Lucifer storyline or the situation with Emily’s family in a satisfactory way.

That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the story as a whole, though. I did have a couple of issues with the game, such as the loading screens between different sections of Bloomtown, and the frame rate dropped on me a few times.

Some of the gameplay could have used an explanation, or been explained better – at first I didn’t understand that every demon needed to be downed to subdue one. There are a few things I’d change, like the saving system or the stressful chase scene (that had checkpoints, to be fair, but still). I was disappointed that there isn’t a New Game+ feature.

While Bloomtown: A Different Story isn’t perfect, I still had a really good time with it. Some people have described it as a combination of Persona and Gravity Falls, which I can totally see.

I found the graphics quite charming, and the soundtrack – with vocals – very well might be my favorite video game soundtrack this year. It was refreshing to have a game set decades in the past. I had fun running around town, and I really liked all of the characters in my party (especially Hugo the talking corgi).

If you enjoy RPGs with monster taming and social elements like me, I would recommend it. I spent about 25-30 hours playing Bloomtown, and I enjoyed it enough to want to play it again.