I would love to know how The Last Campfire was made. Not the coding or the art, which I’ll happily admit I would not understand even if I had a lifetime of education ahead of me. But the thinking behind the design. This is a puzzle game in which puzzles are everywhere – puzzles of different types, of different approaches, puzzles operating at different levels of the construction. Somewhere I imagine a huge wall filled with paper and bits of string – one of those evidence walls from the kind of shows you get on the Alibi channel. Every idea, every gimmick, every buried connection between one part and another. Beautiful!
The Last Campfire is a game about puzzles and lost hope, I think. It’s also a follow up of sorts to the Lost Winds games from yesteryear. There’s the same core team, but also the same preoccupations – lonely rock warmed by the sun, unruly patches of grass, a faith, deep down, in the noble aspects of game design at its most rigorous. This time you are cast as Ember, a sort of flour-sack character who’s off on a dangerous and difficult journey. Along the way Ember meets various other flour-sack characters called Forlorn, who had all lapsed into various strains of despair. How does Ember pull them out of it? Puzzles.
The game’s handful of campfires are gathering areas for Forlorns who have been helped by Ember. Help them all and you can move onto another level. The puzzles that you have to solve for the Forlorns are often beautifully done. You’ll find a Forlorn out there in the world, and then the rest of the landscape will dim to darkness and be replaced by a little block of puzzle sculpture – a thing for you to solve. Push blocks, move snake-like articulated thingies around, navigate wind turbines – that’s the starter sort of stuff. If you’re itching for a game where you move light around with lenses this is the game for you! If you like switch plates and weights to keep them down, look no further!
