Blossom, NY

OK, now for the first installment in a series that we’ll occasionally dip into through the remainder of the Review-a-Thon:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

See, I have beta tested a fair number of games, and I got no more than a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep at a time when my son was in his baby-to-toddler phase, meaning that my medium-term memories of like 2022-4 come in obscure glimpses rather than a coherent whole. But when I saw the name “Blossom, NY” pop up on my to-play list, suddenly I recollected testing a game by the author set in upstate New York, where you used a Google Maps type interface (maybe it was literally Google Maps?) to follow pointers from one historical building to the next, learning more about the architecture and personalities at each stop.

It was a fun way of exploring local history, so I was excited to come back around to it and give it a go in something more closely resembling my right mind – only to discover that No, I Did Not Beta Test This. I’m pretty sure it’s set in the same town hamlet, with the same general theme, but the presentation is more traditional, as it takes the form of an illustrated travelogue narrated by (a version of) the author, implemented in Twine with links alternately progressing to a new site, or providing footnote-type explanations that go into topics discussed in the main text in more depth.

I’m still a fan, though! Like here’s a tip, if you want maximize your chances of getting a good review from me, you can’t go wrong by including a passage entitled “Municipal Divisions of New York State.” And as I read it I couldn’t help noting that it’s pretty northeast-focused, since the “township” model it discusses doesn’t hold in most of the west, where there are lots of unincorporated communities within counties rather than literally everything being attached to some sub-county level division. But nerding out in this very specific way is a lot of fun to me, especially when it’s paired with cool photos and background on the German sect that occupied the town for a decade before deciding that thing were getting too worldly and moving on. There’s a well-preserved mill, and old bridges, and 19th-century houses incompetently updated to modern standards! And the author’s inconclusive detective work aiming to uncover the origin of the town’s name is so great I’m surprised it was relegated to optional, red-link status.

There’s not much of a narrative here – as I said, it’s pretty much a tour, and a short one given that the town only occupies about two streets. There’s no grand drama revealed in the past, just an accumulation of migrations (some voluntary, some forced: this was Seneca land originally, and then one of their reservations, before being displaced), fires, and renovations. I didn’t mind any of that, my only critique is that I wish the game had been longer, and went even deeper, since I was having such a good time; I dimly remembered other buildings and other anecdotes from the Google Maps version I actually tested, and wanted to hear more about the rivalry between the German Evangelicals and German Lutherans, or what kind of stuff the gift shop that moved into the old lightning-struck church building sells.

Blossom isn’t anyplace special in the scheme of things, I’m sure you could make a game equally compelling about any of five hundred other towns in New York. But that’s the point, to my mind – every place has its stories worth telling, and this is a great formal for telling them.