Game 124 - The Last Campfire - Week X - Apr 24

he Last Campfire surprised me. I had no expectations going into it but first impressions were not good, in fact I thought it was incredibly dull, falling asleep while playing in the middle of the day. I'm not really a puzzle game guy and at first there seemed to be nothing special like there is in Portal to draw me in. But it was short and so I put on my speed running boots and decided to power through it. I'm not sure when it was, but the game charmed me over. The game is very whimsical and the characters have a cartoony ember like manner to them. The world and art itself just has a very wholesome feel to it that's very inviting. Whether it be the narrator who describes the blue ember (main character) going down a slide only to end up face first in mud, but the ember doesn't care because it was fun. Or perhaps its the pig who you can lure with an apple, waddling over to a blockade of brambles guarded by a ember-eating plant, shoving the apple in its fly trap and watching the pig wrestle it to death and clearing you a path in doing so. The gameplay is what won me over in the end. It has some light adventure mechanics like finding a net, getting a fishermen to repair and then using it to fish up another item a character requires to progress. But the bread and butter of course is the puzzles. The story is somewhat dystopian, the lands are no longer liveable and your kind, embers, are on a pilgrimage to find a new land, the last campfire so to speak. In your journey you'll come across embers who are forlorn, essentially they've lost hope and died. So for each of them you must travel inside and retrieve their fire of hope by completing the puzzles, at which point they return to your campfire ready to progress with you. The puzzles are simple, short and enjoyable, never overstaying their welcome. Each one is unique and there is always a satisfaction to completing them. As you recover the fire of a ember, they'll join you at your camp. Once you've recovered all seven in an area, you're ready to move on to the next area. Working your way through an area and recovering each ember one by one feels so rewarding. As you travel you'll notice the red ember (to your blue) in the distance, watching you. Eventually you'll come across the bird people and the Forest King. They're obviously embers puppeteering the birds and they want to keep the others in their walled garden and you from progressing into the dangerous wastelands. As you travel you find notes from the Wanderer's journal. In the end this all turns out to be the red ember, who has trail blazed the rest and found nothing, except other forlorn embers and no hope. So the red ember tried to create a sanctuary and stop others progressing. As you defy this he fails and the little hope he had was gone. You convince him all hope is not lost and you progress together with the other embers. The game ends as you leave the last campfire into a new world. A world that had been foreshadowed throughout the game by a mysterious map with a labyrinth ending in a large ember symbol, paradise? As the game pans up to roll credits, it would have been nice to see a beautiful landscape and bountiful world but instead it fades to black. Oh well, it was still a wonderfully charming game to play.