The Last Campfire
This has been a delightful little puzzler that reminds me of Ico and the Playdead games. It's on the easy side and has a children's story atmosphere to it. I imagine it's gonna net you a handful of hours of playtime but I'm impressed by the mix of heart, story, music, and gameplay. Its solid mix of those qualities has kept me engaged and eager to come back after breaks. What more could you ask from a puzzle heavy game? I think I picked it up for pennies during the last Steam sale.
OK, I bought and played this one, because I was in the mood for a casual game at the moment.
I paid roughly 3 bucks for it, which was OK.
The game isn't worth more, though, IMO - certainly not the normal price.
First: This is not a Metroidvania game (and this is coming from someone how would defend Yoku's Island Express as being one.):
- You only get one extra ability about one fourth into the game, but nothing more.
- While theoretically it is possible to backtrack into former areas, it is completely unnecessary. You can solve every puzzle and get every item in an area the first time you enter it.
To make it clear: Each area consists of several rooms. While you have to move back and forth between these rooms to solve this specific area, you never have to come back to any of these rooms, after you have moved on to the next area.
- There are no enemies and no fighting at all in the whole game.
The puzzles are on the easy side, which was to be expected for a casual game, so you can't fault the game for that.
And you have to give credit to the makers, that there is a good variety of puzzle mechanics, so you rarely experience completely the same puzzle one after another.
There is almost always a small twist making it different from the previous one. New mechanics are also introduced in a way that is very intuitive to learn.
But unfortunately, the game suffers from atrocious writing.
I general don't mind a childish story and writing for a casual game that can also be played by kids.
The problem is, that the writers thought, that they had to do "more" and so they added very cringy poems, that you can find - but luckily also ignore - throughout the game, that explain some of the backstory.
The style of these reminded me somewhat of a seven year old trying to emulate Shakespeare.
But as I said, you ignore these.
What you can't avoid, are the narrations inside the special puzzle levels (which you reach, when you enter the mind of some characters).
Inside these levels each time you solve part of the puzzle or move to some new platform, the game "rewards" you with artsy, pretentious one-liners, which talk about "emotions" and similar stuff.
Also the writers use gendered SJW speech, so all characters refer to themselves or others only in plural form ("they", "them", "we", "us" etc.), even if the sentence is talking about a single person.
Apart from being very retarded and wrong English, it makes it sometimes difficult to recognize, about whom the characters are talking about - especially when there are several characters on the screen.
All text is spoken by one actress as a narrator.
Narration is done for the most part in 3rd person, but sometimes switches to 1st person of the current character you are talking to.
Opinions about her voice acting may differ.
In the Steam forums, some people got excited about her "wonderful performance".
I personally found her terrible and constantly overacting, but luckily you turn the narration off in the options.
TLDR:
This is not a Metroidvanian, but a casual puzzle game with a variety of mostly platform puzzles and some inventory puzzles, a simple story, but unfortunately also with bad writing.
If you can ignore the latter and are in the mood for light puzzling, you can try it. Just don't pay the full prize.
, Order of Ecclesia - not necessarily in that order).
