Blooming Nightshade has some interesting characters going for it but lacks the depth to pull off much with them. For starters after a prologue introducing you to the various people you simply pick which girl you want to romance. I would have preferred something more organic. For starters you pick based off the prologue which aside from some basic details don’t tell you much about any of them. Then once you do pick things move fairly quickly to the point where they’re professing their love after one real date and hanging out a few times. There are a few choices to make but nothing of much significance. The art was decent as was the music. I liked the story but it needed to be fleshed out more. I liked the background of the school but again not much is told about it. You learn a bit about the girls but not much time to process any of it and everything is handled in a rushed fashion.

    I played Blooming Nightshade on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors or bugs. You can manually save whenever you want and there are 12 save slots. Alt-Tab didn’t work.

Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.4.1439
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 230 MB

GPU Usage: 0-46 %
VRAM Usage: 738-1141 MB
CPU Usage: 3-5 %
RAM Usage: 3.0-3.1 GB

    Blooming Nightshade isn’t a bad game but it could have been much better. You aren’t given a ton of choice and there isn’t much story there to decide over. It could have done more with the characters which were interesting. I finished my first play through in 24 minutes.

My Score: 6.5/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.3 | Linux Mint 20.3 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.4.0-97-generic