Witch cards will drop: Fire

So I think of myself as an individual who dislikes adventure games, but when I look back over the games I've played since starting up this blog, there are a pair of adventure games - Primordia and Morningstar - which I actually look back on positively. And that's my entire line of adventure games, right there, so maybe I'm wrong.

Or maybe those were just good games.

Fire is an adventure (puzzle/exploration) game set in a fantasy stone age world, along the lines of something like There was a Cave Man, or maybe a better example is Bonk's Adventure or the Flintstone's. I wish there was a Bonk's Adventure game on Steam, that would be good to review, since those games are acid trips. The game does not have english writing nor english dialogue, instead conveying information entirely through visual and more basic sounds than pure language. Though it does onga bonga blap blap at you as well, I guess. Basically, Fire is "in the stone age" through the lens of a drug high sliding in the wrong direction toward a bad trip.

The game's interesting hook is that complete lack of writing; puzzles are not really themed in any meaningful way as per the setting. The last section I bothered to finished had you feeding berries to creatures who looked like cartoon bushes, which would then allow them to play music. Once you lined up the tunes, and then spoke to cavemen in masks, the music would reduce them to meat. You then feed the meat to baby birds, who go back into their eggs and...

Well, you get the idea. Basically, it's not "the stone age", it's just goofy illogical puzzles without much in the way of explanation. The game cheats a little, even, using visual elements that convey speech or convey the meaning behind speech. Pictographs are still text, you know? Visually the game is a total thematic mess, it's pretty obvious the art team just didn't care and made whatever they felt like making. The music and audio, on the other hand, are just there to chill you out and provide gentle ambience while you play. Those are good, or at least, good at suiting what the game needs out of music. I don't think people play Adventure games to rock out while going through the puzzle sections or something.

Basically, the game is a generic puzzle/adventure thing, but entirely lacking any story or narrative structure. You appear on a screen, try to puzzle out the development logic and then you get a firefly that teleports you to the next level. The game's humor is utterly puerile, and the visuals are often weirdly off putting. There's just like, a frog anus or dinosaur brains or people being electrocuted to death to go with happy smiling flowers and dancing dudes who melt into meat. If it was trying to be cute, it would be cute, but instead it halfway tries to be cute and then slops over gore in the other direction.

Basically, I dislike this game, and at about the halfway point I shrugged my shoulders and stopped playing it. The puzzles are a mix of hunting pixels for what you're supposed to click on and then from there warping your brain to logic out puzzles that have so little to do with the setting. Maybe it's normal for adventure games to be so lacking flavor and story, I don't know, but it doesn't feel normal to me.