PAX West 2025: Talking Fractured Blooms and gardening with Serenity Forge Founder Z

When Fractured Blooms debuted during the bombastic and usually AAA-laden Summer Game Fest, we gasped. Geoff Keighley's always been a friend to indies, but whenever we see it happen on the big stage, and not relegated to a preshow or an ad break, it's worth a double take. Especially when it's something new from the amazing folks at Serenity Forge.

At PAX West 2025, we not only got a chance to go hands-on with the game, but also got to chat with development lead and Serenity Forge founder and CEO Zhenghua Yang (Z). We were already so impressed by this unsettling cozy farming sim and its oppressive idyllic atmosphere, but after getting to talk to Z about what awaits in the full release, we're more excited than ever (and a little more knowledgeable about how to maintain the tomato plants in our yard.)

​Just the Facts

Developer: Serenity Forge

Genre: Horror farming and life sim

Release Date: TBA 2026

Hands-on with Fractured Blooms

A young red-haired woman in a white dress and a blue apron sits on a bench, silently staring forward. She gets up. A voice (her own?) inside her head mentions it might be time to start gardening. And she does. She plants some beets. She goes inside, makes dinner, cleans up some laundry, and goes to bed.

The next morning, a young red-haired woman in a white dress and a blue apron sits on a bench, silently staring forward. She gets up. A voice (her own?) inside her head mentions it might be time to start gardening. And she does. She pla– A new voice inside her head interrupts. Laughs at her. Says it might be time to plant daisies instead of beets. So she does. But the world isn't happy about it. Nothing goes right from here.

Fractured Blooms is a fascinating release that hybridizes genres usually associated with the cozy world — farming and life sims — with a mysteriously unsettling psychological horror. Angie is a young girl stuck at a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, with echoes of a broken world all around her. Radios play emergency broadcasts, inner monologues reference folks who are long gone, and things that shouldn't be there keep appearing. They keep watching.

As you go through her daily routine — gardening, cooking, and cleaning — Angie will mutter about her surroundings into your ears with a lazy lilt. It's not sleepy, but it's dreamy. As if her actions are barely her own and she knows it, but can do nothing about it. Nichole Goodnight, streamer and voice actor extraordinaire well known for her work in Slay the Princess, is involved with the project, which has a fully voice-acted cast. But when we asked our Serenity Forge contact for clarity on her role, considering the layering voices and all, we got a cheekily deflective response. Adding even more intrigue to an already mysterious project.

Regardless, Angie's dazed speaking feels like a fraying thread ready to snap as the horrors around you start to close in. The second voice, sardonic and mocking, feels immediately more welcoming. Somehow. And the layering of their voices flooded my mind in the way my own internal voice is apt to do in the middle of the night. The debut trailer for the game came with a chorus of voices that I'm both frightened and excited to hear blasting my mind while I try to garden.

There is an admitted satisfaction to the gardening and cooking aspects of the game. Both ask you to really methodically take your time with the task. You grab just one piece of the puzzle at a time as you till soil or cook some tomato soup.

And you'd be forgiven for thinking this was just a fun little moody life sim when playing through the game's first day. Sure, there's an odd three-minute timer that pops up when you're tasked with picking up laundry upstairs, and some of the comments Angie makes are a little disturbing, but Fractured Blooms isn't immediately in your face with its horrors.

It's when Angie wakes up outside the farmhouse the second time that its thrills begin to reveal themselves. Red tendrils overgrow around your farm. Eerie noises lurk beyond the horizon. And when you approach the house, a camera view suddenly takes over, showing someone watching you from just above the porch. From that point on, it's chaos. Someone chases you as you enter the house and the door starts rattling. Noises all throughout the house keep the tension up. Someone wants in. Ingredients and cooking utensils are not where you left them.

And you're expected to do your chores as usual. Because what else would you do but continue on living? (Who can relate?)

Serenity Forge has a fascinating project cooking here: one that blends the domestic routine of a life sim with a constant driving tension that keeps you pushing through the terrors to get your chores done. Fractured Blooms was already one of our most anticipated games, but after getting hands on with it, it stands as one of the best games we played at PAX.

And that's how we felt before we had the chance to chat with Z about the nitty gritty behind the game (plus some nuggets of wisdom for a thriving garden). Read the interview below!

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Serenity Forge's Zhenghua Yang (Z) on Fractured Blooms: PAX West Q&A

VGG (Julie): Can you introduce yourself and a little bit about how you like to describe your game?

Z: My name is Z. I'm the Founder and Executive Director at Serenity Forge. I'm also the Game Director of Fractured Blooms. Fractured Blooms is a life sim, farming sim, and cooking sim, that kind of has a lot more going for it. It’s obviously a horror game as well, but maybe there's a little bit more beyond that, too.

VGG (Nate): One of the most compelling aspects of the project when we saw it revealed during Summer Game Fest (congrats, by the way!) was the idea that this project is pretty personal. Would you be comfortable elaborating on that?

Z: The story of Fractured Blooms is actually inspired by stories of my own family, and everything that happens in the game is very deeply personal.

A lot of times when we think about nonfictional narratives though, it becomes a lot more blunt and sometimes too pointed. We wanted to share this story in an artistic way and to be able to tell it in a nuanced fashion. This game is really made for everyone, made with a very low barrier of entry, to be more inclusive.

VGG (Julie): With how much Fractured Blooms seems to be attempting with it being part psychological horror and part farming/life sim, I'm sure the inspirations are a bit eclectic. Can you talk a little bit about some of your inspirations and some of the unexpected ways they may have played into development?

Z: I mean, to start off, obviously it's inspired by other games, right? Games like Mouthwashing, Miside, or We Harvest Shadows. These are the games that really inspire us. But also older games like Silent Hill, these more cerebral narrative-driven horror games that are more psychological and less about going around whacking monsters.

On the personal level, I am mostly inspired by things outside of games. I'm a huge gardener myself. I grow a ton of different plants and veggies in our yard. I love cooking. So a lot of times, I would look at things like… there's a weed that I just cannot get rid of in my garden coming back every year. Every year, I just can’t get rid of it. How resilient. Why can’t I be more like that, right?

Ultimately, I think the biggest inspiration for me actually comes from, maybe no surprise [in today’s world], but anger and frustration.

I mean, there's a lot to be angry about. There's a lot to be frustrated about right now. And I think, for me, I wanted to be able to open up a way for people to talk about that in sophisticated ways. And not just in ourselves, but in the feelings of each other.

VGG (Nate): I definitely feel it. Having just played the demo now, that feeling of being overwhelmed, of being helpless. It came through.

I also felt this… kind of simmering something fueling the whole thing. Like something was about to snap. It's not obvious, there's no clear link between the two, but I feel like our last Game of the Year, 1000xRESIST…

Z: Oh yeah. One of my favorite games.

VGG (Nate): There’s that same kind of energy there that's similar here.

Z: Yeah. I think for me — this is maybe weird for me to say — but I don't think I make games for the love of games. I think I make games for the hatred of the games not being made.

I just get so upset that people are not making the games that need to be made. So, I guess someone fucking has to do it. [laughs] That's why I do what I do.

VGG (Nate): Very much that classic Thanos meme... “I guess I'll do it myself.” That's an approach we love every time. Especially in the indie space, you see it a lot. People being like “you know what, no. Nintendo’s not making [BLANK] so I’m gonna do it." I love that initiative.

Fractured Blooms is set to see each day shift around you: the space changes around you, the environment shifts and reacts to what you're doing. How dynamic are those changes? And what kinds of ways do you manage to surprise players?

Z: In the demo, you saw a little bit of that, but we also made sure to cut down on this demo for convention purposes. We stripped out most of the farming and cooking; it's a lot more linear as a result.

In the full game, there are a lot more choices that you make. Some choices are temporary, some choices are permanent, and based on the choices that you make, you start to realize how the world is gonna react around you, and also how you will start reacting as well, on top of that.

This is a game where choices really do matter. There's multiple endings and, ultimately, each of those endings actually reveal certain parts about what this world really is and what it really means, based on how you observe the world changing around you.

VGG (Nate): I just remembered I wanted to circle back to the fact that you were mentioning how you're a gardener and that kind of motivated portions of this game.

We just moved to a place where we finally have our own little garden. And it's funny that tomatoes are such a focus in this demo, because we just got to harvest our first ones... You were talking about all these things you learn, right, when you're trying new things.

Our first ones that ripened, we thought we had these great tomatoes. And then you look at the bottom and they're all rotten. They had this thing called end rot. It's just funny how you end up seeing all these little parallels and the stresses of farming in the game and in real life.

Z: Yeah, I mean with a lot of tomato plants, you have to clip the bottom leaves. You gotta get rid of the suckers. You gotta prop 'em up so that they're getting proper air flow.

VGG (Nate): This is perfect advice, gotta take some notes!

Z: A lot of times you want to plant some companion plants like basils or mints around it. Maybe not mint, if you don't wanna ruin your garden… but I can talk about this stuff forever.

VGG (Julie): Hey, I'll take the tips wherever I can get 'em. But to steer us back to the game… Fractured Blooms really seems to thrive in the juxtaposition of the cozy/mundane and horror. Obviously, you're keeping a lot of things behind closed doors, but can you talk about striking that balance?

Z: There's a quote, I don't remember who said it, but it says, 'really good art is supposed to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.' I think for us, that's really one of the key goals here. You look at cozy games, and sometimes, they don't really punch hard enough to have that type of message. But then you look at horror games, and maybe they're only punching, and there's really not much substance beyond that.

The way that we balance that is that we take a closer examination of the everyday life of Americans, right? What are the elements of that that are horrifying? What are the elements that are joyous? Then we bring it together and build out this normal, everyday kind of feeling.

It’s these moments of “Oh, I kind of know that feeling.” Like trying to turn off a TV that’s blaring while you try to cook or trying to collect the laundry before the time is up, and horrors surround you. It’s awkwardly relevant to my day-to-day life, even though what’s happening in the game is not what's literally happening around me.

VGG (Nate): Yeah. I think, sadly, a lot of people can probably relate to trying to do daily tasks and feeling this dread that they can’t quite explain and, you know, making it through anyway.

For me, just now at the end of the demo, I didn't get all the laundry done before the timer ran out on the second day when things are going wild. And it was so funny, because at first my instinct was to just curl up and say, “oh no, I lost.” Then I was like, “well, gotta do the laundry.” So, I ran through the house to get the last pieces.

I've been there, you know, I've had a bad day and wanna just curl up into a ball but… no. Gotta do the laundry.

Z: Yeah! You can’t not finish the laundry. You don't get a choice.

VGG (Julie): I feel like we're there every day right now, where it's just like: horrible news, horrible news, horrible news... Still I have to go to work. I have laundry or dishes. You just power through.

Z: Yeah, you can’t just put it behind you and pretend it didn't happen. You can't just not eat. You can't just not work.

VGG (Nate): That's why I think games like this are so exciting to us, right? Because obviously we have our moments. We have our bad day and then we just hop on Fortnite or whatever. But then, having a game like this… it does feel so fulfilling in how it reflects what's really happening to us and how it feels every day.

Z: A lot of times for us, too, it’s like, maybe not everyone's feeling that. And maybe people should understand others and what they’re going through a little bit better.

VGG (Nate): Open people's eyes to how others are feeling.

Z: Exactly.

VGG (Nate): If video games have one superpower I could define, it's just the empathetic potential.

Speaking of, I kind of mentioned earlier that Serenity Forge is a publishing house we’ve been following for a while. And it’s funny, because it wasn’t until recently that I was going through the library and realizing how far back we go. Back to things like Half Past Fate, Land of Screens, and realizing “Oh! That’s Serenity Forge.”

And then even seeing you collaborate with some games that really meant a lot to us in recent years, like Smile for Me and To the Moon. That's a game I played back in 2011, and it affected me so much that I wrote the developer, Kan, an email and he responded back.

To see how many of the games this team works with that are part of the reason we love indie games in the first place is so exciting. So first, thank you. Our site has a simple message: Video games are good. We try to celebrate this industry. So seeing, teams like yours continue to bring interesting works and help them reach the finish line means so much.

Z: Appreciate it. The whole point of Serenity Forge… our mission statement is that we create meaningful and emotionally impactful experiences that challenge what you think. All of our games are here to make the world a slightly better place however we can. But then also try to create the kind of emotional impact that you hold onto forever.

You might only spend maybe four hours playing a game like To the Moon, but that story is gonna go with you for the rest of your life. Those are the kind of experiences that we want to create.

VGG (Nate): Can you talk briefly about where the studio's headed? And how games like Fractured Blooms factor into its future?

Z: We're still a relatively small studio. Fractured Blooms, the demo you played, we started building it in February of this year with a team of maybe four people. It took us about two or three months and it’s all still pretty early. We’re gonna be finishing that out and that’s a major part of our future from here.

But we also have a couple of new games that we're working on that we haven't yet announced. So, be on the lookout for that.

I think for us it's never really been about how we're gonna make the money and some kind of exit plan from there. It's always thinking about… “what is the next thing that we can do to kind of push society forward just a little bit in our own ways?”

We care a lot about the message of the games that we make or publish. We care a lot about the emotional impact. We have a lot more coming and I'm really excited to show you guys.

VGG (Nate): Is there any last thought you want to share about your game?

Z: I think Fractured Blooms is one of those games where you might think you know what it is by looking at it right now, but it's actually a lot more than that. You’re barely scratching the surface with even the demo that you played. I can't wait to show people what our true intent really is with the game.

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Thanks for reading our coverage direct from the PAX West show floor. If you found it interesting and want to read more hands-on game previews and interviews with developers, visit our PAX West articles. Or check out our recap stream for a behind-the-scenes on what we did, played, and saw during all four days of PAX.