Plunging the house into the gaping maw (not the one you’re thinking of), I hear its screams as it tumbles out of reach from my mouse click. It vanishes from sight, accompanied by a sickeningly moist crunch that reveals its grim fate. The entity’s jaws immediately widen once more, filled with teeth and a dripping tongue, eager to devour vegetation, trees, and even towering buildings.
Welcome to In Full Bloom, a game that earns a perfect score of 10/10 in the ironically named category. Set in a desolate, colorless universe devoid of hope, the game challenges you with an impossible task. Your mission is to keep the insatiable child of perpetual consumption content by continuously feeding it an endless stream of junk.
The demo for this game has been available on Itch.io for some time now, with a Steam page hinting at a full release in 2026. What drew me to In Full Bloom today was a single tweet featuring a snapshot of Swiss studio Obleak Games’ display at Gamescom. The sight of a colossal mouth perched atop a dark planet intrigued me enough to give it a try.
I’m pleased that I did. In Full Bloom is often compared to Katamari, and rightfully so. It’s as if the creators of Katamari asked themselves, ‘How can we take everything that doesn’t make your skin crawl in our game and turn it into an overwhelming sensation that you can’t shake off?’ In other words, playing this game feels like immersing yourself in a MeatCanyon video about ASMR, actively participating in the unsettling events unfolding before you.
Admittedly, I may be exaggerating a bit, but if the sound of people eating makes you cringe, this game is not for you. The demo consists of three stages – small mouth, big mouth, and bigger mouth. Starting with the small mouth, you feed it debris and colorless vegetables from a garden, watching it grow with each gulp. At this stage, the entity is young, emitting panicked baby noises amidst the slurping and swallowing of its three-toothed mouth. The intensity of these sounds escalates if you pause the feeding, but they made me so uneasy that I couldn’t bear to slow down.
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The big mouth has matured, now equipped with a full set of human teeth, capable of devouring entire neighborhoods. Fences, trees, houses howling in terror. There’s even a bus circling the creature – you can attempt to have your strange offspring catch it by pointing with the mouse, although I wasn’t successful. The deliberate sluggishness of this movement, while preventing In Full Bloom from being a static experience and aligning perfectly with its atmosphere, lacks the frenetic rolling that defines the exhilarating pace of classic Katamari and fuels much of the enjoyment.
The gratification of collecting increasingly absurd quantities and sizes of objects remains, but it has morphed into a terrifying act as you sacrifice moons to a continent-sized pit of despair.
The demo requires further development before it becomes a game I could see myself playing for more than one session. Its appeal largely hinges on the novelty of its peculiarity. Currently, it serves as a poignant metaphor for the voracious nature of capitalism, constantly craving more, demanding relentless and unsustainable growth because, as the game’s description states, “there is only one way.”
However, I believe its relevance extends beyond that. Perhaps it’s because the experience is fresh in my mind, but it reminded me of how overwhelmed I often feel when covering major gaming exhibitions. I love video games, but when they are thrown at you one after the other, in a whirlwind of minutes or hours, they blend into a chaotic mix of lights, faces, voices, explosions, platforms, release dates, and jumbled information.
By the time you focus on one game, the next one is already there, like scoops of ice cream being fired from a machine gun. In the rush of the moment, the task is to swiftly convey information from the stream to the virtual page. Vanilla ice cream. Speeding at 50mph. Could be a double scoop with the deluxe edition for £50.99. Publish.
There’s certainly a skill to it, and an even greater skill in absorbing all this stimuli and occasionally providing insightful commentary, like ‘the consistency of that mint scoop as it flies by may suggest chocolate chips, an improvement from the last scoop which lacked chips, much to the dismay of many long-time fans.’ Like those watching from home, there’s an excitement in discovering which games will be showcased, but the adrenaline rush is fueled by the thrill of the chaos.
Perhaps one day, this work will feel more like the joyous rolling of Katamari, but for now, it’s akin to feeding In Full Bloom’s insatiable maw. Speaking of which, oh no, it seems hungry once again.
