In a horror game, unsettling normalcy is perhaps the most frightening element. The dread that something bad is about to happen feels worse when it happens in a place that's supposed to be relatively calm. Fractured Blooms takes this idea and runs with it.

It is worth noting that the demo, which is available on Steam, warns you that the contents don't play out quite the same as in the full game. This is meant to be more of a vibe check to convey the type of scenarios and sense of fear the full game will go for. Whether this is a fake-out remains to be seen, but it is something to keep in mind before the full game hits.

Fractured Blooms opens at the edge of a forest, where your character is tasked with tending to a small garden. Pick the lone tomato, grab the beet seeds, plant them, etc. There are not too many activities, but it's enough to establish that the garden keeps things running. From there, you go inside the house to cook dinner before setting up the washing machine to do some laundry before going to bed.

While things may initially seem normal, something feels off. Your character's description of the house and her room as something "suffocating" her is already a telltale sign that something is amiss. Dicing the tomatoes produces splashes that look like blood. There's something in her room with a pulsating red glow, but your character seems to pay no mind.

The first real scare of the game comes when you declare that you need to do some laundry before going to bed. A clock appears, informing you that you have two minutes to get this task done before you can sleep. Suddenly, what appears to be a calm game turns into panic, as you're rushing to find the clothes and put them into the machine one at a time because you can't carry multiple clothing articles at once. The fear of a penalty rises as the clock ticks down, and unless you absolutely know where everything is beforehand, the chances of you getting everything and turning on the machine before the timer expires is very slim.

Without spoiling anything, you go to sleep and wake up only to find that you're repeating your previous day's tasks. However, the atmosphere outside has turned darker, and there are red overgrowths at the garden entrance. You begin to hear voices questioning what you're doing and chastising you for repeating your tasks instead of trying something new. Suddenly, everything you do results in failure. You have no energy to water everything, and the house starts to turn against you. Electronics start turning on automatically, items mysteriously move to different locations when you aren't looking, and the red growth in your room starts to take over more of the house. Yet even when you repeat tasks, you never hear a change in your own character's narration, so any fear generated from the scenes is coming from you as the player, rather than reacting to the character. This goes back to what was mentioned earlier about what passes for an unsettling normalcy, which makes the situation more terrifying, since the number of jump-scares in the demo may be limited to one or two instances.

The demo is rather short, and if it were a true slice of the game, it would be looked at questionably. Most of that would be due to the pacing, which goes from idyllic monotony to haywire in the span of two in-game days. However, as a demo that's meant to sell people on the game's mood, it works perfectly. What you're getting is a horror walking simulator, where the world is full of mystery beyond the strange things happening in and around the house. The protagonist's monologue hides something bigger in the story — and that's before she starts hearing other versions of herself in her head. With repetition being a key mechanic, it'll be interesting to see how many loops it'll take before things get worse and how many opportunities will there be to do something outside of the time loop.

This isn't the full game, but those who primarily play on the Steam Deck will be pleased that the game works if you do some tweaking to the demo. You'll need to use the latest version of GE-Proton on both the Steam Deck and on Linux desktop PCs. You'll also need to change the resolution to 1280x800, since the demo defaults to 1920x1080 and the Deck's screen will only show the upper left quarter of the screen. Performance is good, as you can average around 40fps, and the battery life hits around 90 minutes on the LCD version of the device.

If the demo is any indication, Fractured Blooms has the potential to be a real mind trip. The mental anguish and supernatural happening combined with the normal everyday routine combine into an intriguing horror playground. While we only got to see a tiny bit of what's happening, the potential for things to get worse and how it gets there does pique my curiosity. Hopefully it won't be too long before the game fully releases, so we can see how it all plays out.