Draft:Potato Flowers in Full Bloom

Potato Flowers in Full Bloom is a 2022 indie video game developed by PonPon Studios and published by PLAYISM for Windows and the Nintendo Switch. The game is a dungeon-crawling role-playing game in which a three-character party explores a post-apocalyptic ruin for poison-resistant potato seeds.

Gameplay
Players explore the dungeon in a first-person, grid-based perspective similar to Wizardry. Enemy encounters are visible on the map. Approaching an encounter from the side or back allows the player to sneak attack the enemy.

Each player character and monster has a "stamina" meter that depletes as they perform attacks, use abilities, or defend against attacks. When the stamina meter is depleted, the character can no longer attack or defend and must use a turn to rest, restoring their stamina.

Monsters display their intended action on each turn, allowing the player to choose an appropriate counterstrategy. Because sources of healing are rare and difficult to use, battles tend to emphasize defense rather than recovery.

Players create their own custom parties of adventurers from eight classes: fighter, knight, rogue, ranger, cleric, shaman, wizard, and demonologist. Each class has a different skill tree that determines which combat abilities can be learned. Players may also choose a race for each party member, but these choices are strictly cosmetic: there is no difference between a gnome knight and an orc knight.

Plot
Poison is spreading across the land, causing crops to fail. The party searches an abandoned ruin looking for potato seeds that are resistant to the poison.

Reception
Potato Flowers in Full Bloom received a number of awards in the Japanese indie video game community. It received the grand prize in the SQOOLNET 2022 Summer Game Awards. It won the "Rediscovery Award" in the IndieLiveExpo 2022 awards, representing "the game that not necessarily created a new genre but broadened an existing genre and perfected it for gamers to comfortably purchase the game." It received 9th place in the Dengeki Online Indie Video Game Awards 2023.