The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands Reviews

5/10

I would definently give this game a massive yes, however there is just so little content.

Good game, I had fun playing it but I think more could be added. 8.5/10

Pretty bad... Flawed, bugged & unforgiving for bad reasons. Little content.

Excellent presentation buys a lot of good will for an otherwise shrimpy web game port. The Bonfire wears its premise on its sleeve, and it's the kind of thing we've seen before, mostly in non-graphical browser games. A Dark Room, Candy Box (and its excellent sequel), Infinite Paperclips, etc. In fact, I discovered the game while trying to find stuff similar to them. After an initial playthrough on an ad bloated host that offered me in game rewards to watch ads, I decided to plunk down some cash on Steam so I wouldn't be bothered. In replaying the early parts of the game, I found myself noticing that I wasn't really doing anything different from my first playthrough. The RNG elements are strong here, but there aren't many. Each new worker, of which you get between 1 and 2 each day, is assigned a trait that makes them more or less suited for the various combat or resource collection/processing tasks you can give them. Your imagination does a lot of the heavy lifting here, since none of the traits are actually explained, but it feels good to assign the "correct" workers to the tasks that their traits benefit. Of course, a wiki read after my playthrough confirmed that a lot of my guesses about trait to task relevance were completely wrong, but oh well. The other element of RNG you'll face every day is the nightly spawn of enemies. At first, these will be one or two humble wolves, easily dispatched alone by your unarmed avatar, but unless you stay extremely proactive about recruiting and arming guards (who sleep during the day but still eat, making them a resource drain) you can be very quickly done in by a random attack from a couple hell-giraffes. Even if you do take the care to arm your guards, though, the randomness of the enemy spawns can mean you'll get hit by anything from a colossal murder spider to a few bad dogs. My losses to night monsters rarely felt earned - just a randomly applied punishment for not spamming guards. Aside from those elements of randomness, the game (and thus its progression) is very strictly linear. You don't have to do everything in the EXACT same order every time, but you'll definitely be doing it ALL in every extremely short playthrough (2-3 hours). Sometimes the next step is obscure - the game casually drops the extremely important Alchemist work type, into a draggable menu alongside its mundane cousins the wood gatherer and farmer, but to successfully train one you've got to intuit that only Wise workers are able to decipher valuable and rare ancient texts, either traded for or found in dungeons (small opt-in excursions that you bring Warriors and Alchemists on - again ruled by RNG, you can face extremely difficult odds in a cave with no treasure or nothing at all). By midgame, where you'll have unlocked Alchemists, the game unfortunately starts to drag a LOT. After you have a critical mass of well armed and armored guards and warriors, you'll be snowballing everything, but until then you'll be struggling against wildly varying night/cave threats with an inability to boost your worker recruitment speed. There are a lot of extremely manual, tedious processes for a genre that is generally extremely user friendly. Re-equipping guardsmen or warriors after temporarily changing them to resource gatherers comes to mind. All this is the ticket cost for an endgame that is, to put it mildly, glacial. I won't go into depth on the mechanics here but suffice it to say you're generally locked into relying on alchemists, the most annoying type of worker to acquire (and dependent on RNG for the right worker trait to even try), and nightly dungeon runs. It's not great, and contributes very little to my sense of developing a settlement or mastering the balance of my various industries. Like so much other mechanical challenge in this game, once you get it right (usually by spamming combat units), the game just crumbles and makes you wait for a while to progress. That said, the excellent presentation here must not be taken for granted. Each worker is animated as they go about their tasks, and there's a decent variety of looks to them (tied to traits? never confirmed). The music is also great. The game definitely looks and sounds much better than its just-servicable gameplay would suggest. The Bonfire will occupy you for at least an afternoon, most likely. At about the cost of a cheap movie ticket, I'd call it worth it if only for the presentation, although the casual gameplay at its worst it can be a clumsy, unfair mess. There's very little incentive to replay, too, given its linearity. I'm really torn between recommending the game as an example of browser ports done decently and not recommending it because of its very limited scope, but as I stated in the opening, excellent presentation pushes it over the top for me. Recommend for fans of small/indie titles people that like to nitpick design choices, or if you're just charmed by the aesthetic in the trailer.

Much less entertaining or exciting version of A Dark Room with OP enemies that attack early and randomly. Why the hell cant I equip my PC with literally anything??? Frustrating more than fun.