Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King (Switch)
Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King is an example of a game being saved by being at the right place at the right time. After an unexceptional Steam release in March of 2017, developer Castle Pixel was in jeopardy of going under, but after porting their title to Nintendo’s young new system the Nintendo Switch in December of that year, the game managed to gain considerable traction. Outselling the PC release 20 to 1 and saving the studio that developed it, Blossom Tales was able to thrive on being an indie title similar to The Legend of Zelda on a system with not much competition to crowd them out of consideration yet. It’s a sweet story of shifting fortunes, and ever since I learned about this redemptive arc for Castle Pixel, I was curious to see what the game that ended up saving them was really like.
Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King is the story of a young girl named Lily who was made a knight of the Kingdom of Blossom the very day the king’s brother stages his attempt to seize it. The wizard Crocus plunges his brother into an unending sleep and leaves to begin amassing his army of orcs for a proper coup, but the king’s knights are sent off to try and find the three flowers that can cure the sleep before it’s too late. Although Lily has just recently joined, she sets off to contribute as well, turning out to be the most valuable knight of them all as her exploration of the land goes far more fluidly than the rather bumbling knights of the kingdom.
If you think a tale of an unassuming warrior fighting monsters and saving a kingdom from a dark wizard sounds familiar, you aren’t wrong for thinking so. Not only does this have direct parallels to the story of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but this plot is presented in the context of the game as a story being told by an old man to his grandchildren. A young boy name Chrys and a girl with the very familiar name Lily listen to their grandpa describe the tale of the adventuring knight, the story framing adding a bit of extra flavor to a familiar concept. Grandpa is the one who explains new weapons and items, tutorials essentially just his way of telling the kids what the new tool would add to the story. A more interesting integration of the story telling framework comes in alterations made to the tale. At different points in the tale, the kids might interrupt and try to add their own touches to the course of events, and this manifests in a few different forms. The kids might suddenly decide the house you found in the swamp is actually made of candy, they might ask their grandpa to revise the cave you entered to have more challenging puzzles or monsters after it was too easy, or they can even quibble over which enemy Lily should fight before the player gets to pick one of the options. These don’t crop up nearly as much as they should and sadly they’re not as consequential as they might sound, picking between different enemies or bosses only making the fight you experience slightly different. Still, the game would be much plainer without the idea, so it is cute when it crops up and begins to influence the adventure.
The main adventure itself makes no secret of its Zelda influence, the top-down perspective, item choice, and more all drawing clear inspiration from titles like A Link to the Past or Link’s Awakening. The song Haven’s Village even sounds suspiciously like Zelda’s Lullaby, and if Nintendo hadn’t urged Castle Pixel to port this game to the Switch themselves, it would perhaps be some cause for concern to trend so closely in style and sound. However, while it’s ideas aren’t exactly fresh, it is copying a franchise that is successful for good reason. Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King has a decently large world map to explore with different sections like a swamp, snowy mountain, and the dark lands where Crocus’s orcs gather their power. Each major area has a dungeon, even the peaceful central castle technically having a rat-infested basement to explore, but the three major regions and Crocus’s domain all have rather sizeable dungeons to delve into. Most of them have a miniboss that introduces the dungeon’s new item like a bow or boomerang that is then incorporated into puzzle solving in the second half before you face the main boss.
Items like your bow, bombs, and boomerang all pull from a stamina bar that depletes when you use the special tool. Rather than having limited arrows or explosives, all you need to watch is that meter and make sure you have the power to pull out the tool when needed. This prevents you from solving all your problems with your powerful items while still making sure you always have them during puzzles that require them. Surprisingly, the humble boomerang is incredibly strong and worth the effort to use, and other items like the fire medallion that surrounds you with pillars of flame find their niche both in practical situations and in combat. You do get more items than you’ll likely find use for if you choose to explore the world and engage with sidequests, but most of the sidequests are incredibly barebones in concept. So many of them are just about finding 20 items of a particular type, these usually dropped by a common enemy like a ghost, golem, or mushroom. This means these sidequests are often about just spending time swinging your sword at simple foes, and your rewards are often underwhelming since the game has most of its optional content pay off with fractional pieces of the health or stamina upgrades. Some sidequests like delivering letters are a little different in concept and you can warp to different parts of the map to navigate it more easily for these slightly more involved activities, but most side content is rather simplistic, only things like the weapon and item upgrades really standing out.
Similarly plain are the puzzles that appear in Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King. The game keeps reusing the same concepts for puzzles throughout the game, the player needing to master mazes where you can only step on each tile once, block pushing puzzles, torch lighting chains, and puzzles where you need to determine which way to make a set of glyphs face. The game doesn’t feature these exclusively of course, but their consistent presence both in regular dungeons and optional areas means they do start to lose their luster even as the difficulty is cranked up. More interesting puzzles often achieve their more engaging design by having enemies or hazard harass you as you to work, the enemy variety doing a good job of shifting around as you continue along your adventure. Living fireballs and bandits are more dangerous because of how they approach or how they work alongside other animals rather than being individually tough, but angry trees, magic-flinging druids, and other creatures that can take hits or evade you well ensure combat does require some good movement and item use. Bosses are rather sturdy and you can easily take damage if you don’t respect their large attack range and dangerous patterns, but it never feels like the game gets too difficult because it happily dishes out healing potions and revival flowers. There are even potions of brief invincibility handed out that can be easily used to push through bosses with little concern, but perhaps Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King being a tale told to children in its canon is also a clue that it would like kids playing it to be able to follow along rather than get crushed by difficult portions. It still finds some moments to be challenging, especially near the end, but it does feel like the experience as a whole could have found more moments to push you mentally or test your combat skills.
THE VERDICT: Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King is a fine little adventure that feels like it could have been much more. The children interrupting the story being told to alter it could have been done in more creative ways, the puzzles could do with more variety, and the sidequests really need more imagination behind them. However, adventuring is still interesting even if your rewards for it aren’t great and the combat has moments where it can mix monsters together into interesting groups. Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King isn’t anything exceptional, but it is an effective tribute to the older Zelda titles and one that still has its moments because it gets enough of the basics right.
And so, I give Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. When you draw so heavily from a specific source like Blossom Tales did with The Legend of Zelda, you need to either match the inspiration in quality or add some exciting new twist to affirm your unique identity. Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King doesn’t really do either of these things, instead making an enjoyable enough replica of its inspirations but not truly bringing much new to the table. Its dungeon design is decent enough and its combat is usually pretty good since monster variety and boss strength help to keep the player active, but nothing really stands out about the experience save for the underutilized concept of having the children and their grandpa alter the story. The game acknowledges its cliches and yet doesn’t do enough to subvert them when it has the perfect means of doing so already implemented, but it is possible constantly shifting the world in response to the storytellers could grow tedious or disorienting as well. Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King definitely could have done with doing it much more before that would be a risk though, and a bit more imagination in puzzle design and sidequest structure would do a lot to help Blossom Tales stand above its current spot of being a charming little Zelda clone.
It is certainly fortunate Castle Pixel was saved by this little title despite its somewhat plain design. A success means the developers will have the chance to build upon their ideas and hopefully make a superior sequel or a game in a different style that can achieve more than snugly settling into the comfortable shadow of a legendary franchise. There’s enough of a spark here that Castle Pixel could hone into something unique, but if they do choose to pursue the retro tribute route again like they did with Blossom Tales and their previous game Rex Rocket, they at least seem like they can turn out another decent little project.