BLOOM

Station VEIL drilled into something that is not water, and the crew has been blooming into fractal light ever since. you wake flooded, amnesiac; already beautiful in one place on your left arm.

The memory terminals will give you your name back, one piece per use. Each terminal tells you, before you agree, exactly what it costs: a percentage of a failing hull, and often a named deck that floods for it, permanently, taking its terminals, its air and its dead with it. Nothing is taken from you without your consent. Giving it is the worst part. 

Knowing yourself costs the ship. You can always walk away. You won't.

Descend. The seals open for what you become on the way down.

A 3-hour jam cut of a larger design.

HOW TO BLOOM

WASD to move, SPACE/ENTER to interact. 

Below the waterline, movement costs air; standing still never does.

Air pockets refill your gauge. At empty, every step is a coin flip: blackout... or the other thing. Desperation is a button. You can choose to keep walking.

Memory terminals are opt-in and one-shot. Each names its price and the deck it drowns before you accept. Saving is the only way to learn who you were, and the only thing that sinks the station.

Bloom stations advance your mutation. Every creature checks your Bloom, not its faction: the phantoms of the crew calm as you rise, the human survivors stop believing you're one of them. They are right.

Three ways out. The deep end is the good one. Probably.

JAM THEMES & LIMITS

Phantoms: the bloomed crew keeping their old work routes, pressure ghosts replaying deaths, and the memory terminals' returning phantom of who you were.

Into the deep end (limitation): the game is one long vertical commitment : depth, mutation, and the save economy are all one-way descents.

CW: body horror, drowning.

CREDITS

Made solo for Mini Jam 215. 

Engine: Godot 4.7

Zero AI used. 

CODE/DESIGN/WRITING/ADUDIO: all mine, written within 72 hours during the jam. Audio is procedurally synthesized (no samples).

HUMAN CREW sprites: Pixel Crawler (Free Pack) by Anokolisa (recolored)

TERRAIN tiles: Craftpix free dungeon pack (recolored)

TYPEFACE: m5x7 by Daniel Linssen.

BLOOMED, PHANTOMS & PICKUPS: created with MOTE (my own pixel-art/spritesheet creation tool, FOSS coming soon!) & quantized to a single 16-color abyssal palette so all art sources read as one big drowned station.