Distant Bloom Review

Lovely game in which you clean up the planet you just landed on. The beginning of the story feels a bit boring and like busy work, but give it time as the game gets so much more enjoyable the more it opens up. It has no missable achievements and takes around 15h to complete.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 15h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: I wrote the following achievement guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Distant Bloom is a game in which you clean up a planet. I love that this has become a genre because I really enjoy cleaning up in games! (Not in real life, that is just boring without an achievement list and without the “ding” sound when finishing a task.)

In the beginning, I had some trouble getting into the game. It felt like they just wanted to keep you busy with the small tasks. Gladly this got better over time, the quests became a bit longer so you could go more of your own way. The further you get into the game, the more it opens up and the more you can do without going back to the base for the next quest. The story also got much more intriguing than you might expect at the beginning of the game.

In Distant Bloom you pick up trash but most importantly you plant different seeds to let nature bloom again on this planet you just landed on. You also have the task of finding your fellow crew members, as they will help you to be able to explore even more of the planet. One of the very unique things in this game is how the gifts you give your fellow crew members appear in their house or just outside their house. It is not like in many farming games where you give people stuff and never see it again. You’ll find every item you made for them in or around their house. However, the food you give them they just eat.. but that makes total sense as well.

The planet you land on is quite a maze, you’ll open up more roads and shortcuts, there also is a teleport system with a hub world if you plant enough plants in an area. However, at the end of the game it still felt like a labyrinth. You know a bit more the way in general, but there are so many sneak ways, or side roads and the map/minimap only gives a global idea of where to find something, but somehow that quite fits the game and makes it more rewarding if you find a hidden patch of empty plant spots on your own.

The biggest issue I had with the game was the final area before the ending of the story. That area has some screenshakes and rumbling of the controller (even when the game is paused but I hope that is a bug). The screenshakes made me quite nauseous, and sadly there aren’t in-game settings to make it less shaky or even turn it off completely. I hope the devs will add this option as I’m not the only one that will feel ill from screenshakes. Gladly it is only happening in a very small area so within 10 to 20 minutes you’re past it.

Distant Bloom has no missable achievements. However, some are temporarily missable if you finish the story because of a bug with the NPCs. The achievements are what you expect in a game like this, clean the planet, give gifts to an NPC, and finish the story. The most challenging achievement is for finding all the crystals as they can be quite hidden and sometimes only be able to unlock them later on in the story. Gladly the developers released a map on which you can see around which area to find them. I made some short YouTube videos to make it even more doable to find the location of those crystals. You can find both the map and a link to the playlist on YouTube in my guide:

Distant Bloom – 100% Achievement Guide

I give Distant Bloom 4,5 out of 5 stars.

This review for Distant Bloom was written on 1 April 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 14 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.