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Review
Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 10m, all places and sidebars
Every now and then, my wife and I fall into a shallow rabbit hole of Real Estate Virtual Tours. Those things are compelling. Walking through a virtual tour of a home, via a UI that often feels like super-high-res Myst. It is a lot of things at once. Transgressive, like you are SNEAKING through someone else’s home. Wondrous in the technology that puts you so solidly in that sense of place. And an always-just-below-surface artificiality. You only have to navigate a close friend’s virtual home to appreciate the difference from the REAL experience. The staging, lighting, shot angles designed to make everything feel bigger, cleaner and more generic that the real counterpart. It’s an appealing unreality that always has a shadow of falseness to it.
This work is a Virtual Tour of a small hamlet. It resoundingly sheds Virtual Tour artificiality, making this a grittier, more rewarding experience. It feels like it is a combination of the unsentimental photography, the concise historical context, even the map geography that accomplishes this. Unlike trying to sell a house by showcasing (and distorting) its broad, sanitized appeal, Blossom revels in the awkward, specific messiness of this small enclave. It feels more authentically than performatively cool.
What Blossom DOES share with its corporate cousin is the impetus to put its reader/player in the driver’s seat. We recognize the appeal of self-directed discovery as a foundational pillar of IF. OF COURSE its power will be harnessed by Capital. While this harnessing might be an indictment of the West’s social system (barring some increasingly tone deaf defenders), Blossom puts this mechanism to a less-compromised purpose. To convey the thrill of discovery. The specifics of Blossom, NY are unique to it of course, but the breadth of it is not. EVERY place in America has that depth of lore. The Eastern Hemisphere has even DEEPER lore. If I’m honest, Blossom is interesting, but not particularly compelling in that. What IS compelling is marrying the exploration to an IF paradigm where the ACT of exploration is as or more enjoyable than the details unearthed.
If I have a regret with this work, I am sorry that its ties to human sacrifice cults, Cosmic Terrors, or pre-human otherness didn’t come to light in this short visit. How far could it be from Arkham?
