BloomKeeper: you guide little naive creatures, and sometimes you have to protect them from themselves

There is a line in BloomKeeper's description worth more than a paragraph of explanation: you must protect the Pouics from the terrain, from corruption, and sometimes from themselves.

Anybody who has played a game about guiding a crowd of devoted, perfectly idiotic little creatures knows exactly what that means.

The principle

The island of Hedera has burned away. The Pouics awaken to make it bloom again, as they always do, but they cannot manage alone.

You are the Guardian. You gather them, keep them together, and lead them to the key points of each level.

Every step makes the landscape bloom beneath you, and every restored area becomes a refuge. But beyond it, the world is still burning.

Where the tension comes from

Two systems pull against each other, and it is nicely judged.

Your colony is your strength and your problem. A single well-placed Pouic can open the way. A large colony saves precious time, and can slip into chaos in one moment of inattention. The more you have, the more powerful you are, and the harder keeping them together becomes.

And the world does not wait. Scorched zones spread constantly, and their reach intensifies as you draw closer to their source.

So you are permanently deciding when to push forward, when to secure a whole area, and when to take time to restore the land. It is risk management disguised as a bucolic stroll, and it is what stops the game being a cute puzzle.

The terrain plays its part too: cliffs, lakes, natural hazards, and forces that draw in or scatter your colony.

What to know

The game launches today, developed and published by Resonance Interactive, with no price or reviews as I write. It plays solo or in online co-op, and a controller is recommended.

My reservation concerns legibility. Crowd-herding is a genre where everything rests on clarity: if you cannot tell why three creatures went the wrong way, frustration quickly replaces attachment. That is the point I would watch in early feedback.

What I like is the inversion of the usual ecological contract. Plenty of games have you restore a world that waits patiently to be healed. Here the studio says it itself: the world does not wait patiently, it keeps burning while you think.

How many Pouics did you lose in a lake? Confessions accepted on the InsertCoins Discord.