Syno Bloom

WOOD AND MORE

About this game

Syno Bloom is a soft and unhurried garden puzzle built around a single gesture. There is no swapping and no dragging here. You look at a bed of eight columns filled with six flower species, you find a cluster of three or more identical blossoms touching each other, and you tap it. The cluster lifts away, the flowers above sink into the gap and a fresh row settles in from the top of the bed.

Cluster size is everything. Three blossoms is a polite little tap, but a cluster of five leaves a seed pod behind, and a cluster of eight or more condenses into prism pollen. A seed pod bursts through everything in the squares around it. Prism pollen reaches across the whole bed and takes every blossom of the most common species with it. Learning to grow a cluster before you take it is the difference between a short season and a long one.

The run is built from seasons. Each season sets a score target and gives you a fixed number of taps, with a small carry over from whatever you had left. Reach the target and the garden moves into the next season with a higher goal. Run out of taps first and the beds go quiet, ending the run with your final score recorded.

Everything you pop feeds the wider garden. The garden screen holds twelve flower beds that open one after another as your lifetime blossom count grows, so even a short run leaves something permanent behind. The codex tracks each of the six species separately and unlocks a written field note once you have collected twenty five of a kind. Twelve badges cover cluster sizes, pod farming, prism use and long term dedication, and the top ten screen ranks your best single run against a field of neighbourhood gardeners.

The game runs in portrait only, works completely offline and contains no advertising and no purchases. The settings screen offers one option, clear data, which wipes the saved garden from this device and lets you begin again from bare soil.

What’s new

Syno Bloom is a soft and unhurried garden puzzle