Unreal Engine 5's photorealism turns an anime life-sim into cosy horror

Although Serenity Forge began as an indie developer, the Colorado-based company is usually known more as a publisher of other indie titles. It's, however, not just about funding or marketing but also about co-development, whether that's handling coding, art, or writing. It's then always been honing its skill sets to get back to developing its own projects, such as the upcoming Fractured Blooms.

If there's one game this cosy life-sim has in common with the company's past collaborations, it's undoubtedly the subversive cult masterpiece Doki Doki Literature Club by Team Salvato, which Serenity Forge worked on the game's expanded Plus! edition. That was, after all, a game that presented itself as a visual novel with cute anime characters, but it also explicitly included trigger warnings about its disturbing content. Fractured Blooms is set in the life-sim genre that many consider to be cosy, where you also appear to take the role of an anime girl. But from its first announcement trailer at last year's Summer Game Fest, something is also clearly off.

"Obviously, the game looks the way it does, with its anime character aesthetic, but in this kind of more photorealistic Unreal world, and that was definitely intentional by design from day one," Serenity Forge CEO, more commonly known as Z, tells me. "We wanted to make a game that obviously generates interest, but at the same time starts asking questions that are now pointing towards some of the thematic pillars of the game that it aims to explore. That way, before the game even launches, players are essentially already theorizing on what this game is."

A cosy horror?

From the game's demo, where you get to grow crops, cook dinner, and take care of chores before bedtime, when suddenly the loop begins again, what arguably adds to its eerie atmosphere is its photorealistic art direction, which, with its first-person perspective and seemingly mundane domestic setting, has an uncanny P.T. vibe. There are, however, some practical reasons behind some of these choices.

"I think the easiest answer here is just that photorealistic graphics are the lowest barrier of understanding for people," Z explains. "When a game relatively resembles the real world, you're going to come into it with a very specific set of expectations that it's going to look and behave like the real world that I'm familiar with. That is a great way for us to set up a scene for subversion. One of the things that I think we're pretty transparent about is the fact that this game is subversive. It's definitely not what you think it is."

Another reason is that, despite the preconception that photorealism is in the primary domain of AAA, he argues that it's also easier than a stylised approach. "You have to come up with something that's very different, very unique, the colours have to match, and the shaders are correct. If you're going to do photorealistic stuff, all you have to do is just look around you and that's what the world looks like."

Making use of UE5

Regarding the first-person perspective, he also explains that the cooking portion of the game would have been clunkier and less immersive. It does, however, raise questions of why your protagonist is supposed to resemble an anime character if you spend the game in first-person, though it's also intriguing that when you explore the house, you'll not see a reflection when in front of a bathroom mirror. "Without spoiling the game too much, players will eventually realise that it's actually pretty necessary for you to not be able to see yourself very clearly," Z teases.

While Unreal Engine 5 is often the engine of choice for developers pursuing photorealism, its capabilities also make it a good fit for a lean team. "The demo took us about four months for a team of four to five developers, so being able to iterate that quickly was actually really nice," Z explains. However, it also helped that this small team had already been using the engine on another project that ultimately got cancelled. "That kind of helped us have this team that is very skilled, with pipelines that learned through that process that we can start fresh with a new project."

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Perhaps another factor behind the photorealism is that Fractured Blooms is based on a true story. It's hard to say what that really means, though it's also not new to Z, whose debut game Loving Life was a visual novel that captured his own near-death experience.

"This is stuff that we live with, stories that we struggled through, and maybe continue to struggle through even today," he concludes. "As an industry, as well as just us as a country, all of that played a pretty major factor in the creation of Fractured Blooms. So as a result, there's just a lot of emotions, a lot of things I want to say, and frankly, a lot of anger I want to express."

Fractured Blooms is coming soon to Steam. You can play the free demo now.