I drop the house into the great maw (not that one). It screams as it falls away from the clutches of my mouse clicker. It disappears from view, but there’s a sickeningly wet crunching that betrays its fate. Oh and the fact that the entity’s jaws immediately flare open once more, teeth and tongue dripping with anguish to cram vegetation, trees, towerblocks into its gullet.
This is In Full Bloom, a game that scores the full 10/10 in the wonderfully ironic naming category. Set in a greyscale universe sucked free of all hope and colour, it tasks you with accomplishing an impossible task. You’ve got to keep the infernal child of constant consumption happy by tossing an unending stream of junk into its mouth.
The demo I’ve just played for it has been out for a little while on Itch.io, while the Steam page foretelling a full release in 2026 went up a couple of months ago. The thing that led me to In Full Bloom today, of all days, was one tweet in a thread, which featured a picture of Swiss studio Obleak Games’ patch of Gamescom. I saw the giant mouth perched atop a dark planet, and decided this was a thing I had to play.
I’m glad I did. In Full Bloom’s described as a Katamari-like, and the truth is that it’s exactly what would happen if the folks who do Katamari were like ‘Right, how can we take everything that doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end in this game, and flip it so that’s a feeling so overwhelming you won’t be able to forget it’. To put it another way, the game’s like jumping into a MeatCanyon video about ASMR. Being not just present among the skin-crawling proceedings, but winding the crank that powers their descent into even more horrific depths.
Ok, I might be being a bit dramatic, but if you dislike the sound of people eating, this isn’t the game for you. The demo has three stages – small mouth, big mouth, and bigger mouth. You start off with the first, feeding it detritus and colourless veg from a garden as it grows with each gulp. The entity’s young at this point, so it makes panicked baby squeals and gurgles amid the slurping and swallowing of its three-toothed maw. I think they get more intense if you stop shovelling food in, but honestly they made me so uncomfortable that I couldn’t entertain slowing down to find out.
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Big mouth’s grown up, so it has a full set of human gnashers and can gradually work its way up to chowing down a full cul-de-sac. Fences, trees, screaming houses. There’s also a bus doing merry laps around the creature – you can have your weird son try to catch it by pointing with the mouse, but I didn’t manage it. The lethargy of this movement, while saving In Full Bloom from being a fully static experience and undeniably fitting with the rest of its atmoshere, does mean there’s nothing akin to the frenetic rolling that gives good universe Katamari its upbeat tempo and fuels a lot of the fun.
The sense of satisfaction you get from plucking up increasingly ludicrous amounts and sizes of object is still there, but that sense of satisfaction has become terrifying, as you sacrifice moons to a continent-proportioned pit of despair.
The demo will need a lot of the fleshing out before it’s a game I can see myself playing for more than one sitting. It’s carried a lot by the novelty of the weirdness. As of right now, it’s a top class metaphor for the mechanisms of capital, always desperate for more, demanding constant and unsustainable growth because as the game’s description says, “there is only one way”.
I reckon it’s more universal than just that, though. It might be because the experience is fresh in my mind, but I spent my time with it being reminded of how helping cover the biggest game showcases has often left me feeling so far in my career. I like video games, but when they’re being fired at you one after the other, in a barrage of double digit minutes or hours, they tend to just blend into an overwhelming soup of lights, faces, rambling voices, bangs, booms, instrumental swells, platforms, release dates, jangling Keighs.
By the time your eyes have adjusted to try and take in one, the next has already arrived, like scoops of ice cream being fired from a machine gun. In the rush of the moment, the job’s to be a speedy vessel of information, from the stream to the virtual page. Ice Cream. Vanilla. Travelling at 50mph. Could have been double scoop if £50.99 deluxe edition was bought. Publish.
There’s a great skill to it, and even more of a skill to being able to take all of this in and occasionally give some useful commentary, like ‘the consistency of that mint scoop as it flies by may hint at chocolate chips, which would be an improvement from the last one, the chiplessness of which I and many long-time fans disliked’. As with folks watching at home, there’s a thrill to just seeing which games pop up, but the adrenaline rush is tied to a love of the scramble.
There may well be a day when this work feels more like classic Katamari rolling to me, but for now it’s more like feeding In Full Bloom’s great gob. Speaking of which, oh god, I think it’s hungry again.
