The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands

非常棒游戏

Очередная мобилка, с которой я зря связался

The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands est une belle surprise pour les amateurs de jeux de gestion et de survie minimalistes. Sous ses airs simples, le jeu propose une expérience prenante où l’on doit gérer un petit campement, attribuer des rôles aux survivants et faire face aux dangers nocturnes. L’ambiance est particulièrement réussie : la direction artistique épurée et la bande-son discrète créent une atmosphère calme mais légèrement oppressante. Chaque décision compte, surtout au début, ce qui donne un vrai sentiment de progression lorsque le village commence à prospérer. Le gameplay reste volontairement simple, ce qui le rend accessible, mais certains joueurs pourraient le trouver répétitif sur la durée. Malgré cela, le jeu brille par son atmosphère et son côté contemplatif. En résumé, The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands est une expérience courte mais immersive, idéale pour ceux qui recherchent un jeu de gestion relaxant avec une touche de défi.

Прошёл эту игру 2 года назад под новый год, да, это скорее мобильная игра, в ней нет тысяч механик, сложных схем и геймплея на 1к+ часов, дизайн у игры простой, но как же это оказалось приятно... Я не пожалел, что прошёл эту игру до конца, один вечер я провёл в ней, сидя под завывания ветра на улице и глядя, как моё поселение растёт Может, кому-то будет не хватать контента, атмосфера не зацепит и он даже не станет тратить на игру больше 10 минут, но тем, кто погрузится в процесс, игра может дать приятный незамысловатый геймплей и хорошие пару-тройку часов проведённого времени

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While the ambient, minimalist style of the game is both unique and appealing, this game is entirely linear (not allowing any creative decisions in running your settlement at all) and drags gameplay out by impeding the movement speed of your workers very heavily. It's a whole lot of waiting around. Whole game feels a bit like a joke at the player's expense; it's an exercise in time wasting and hasn't got anything fun going on. There are some challenges like ''complete hardcore mode'' and ''don't lose a worker to monsters'' and the only way to actually achieve these is to handicap the progress of your settlement by assigning way more workers to guard than is necessary. I could go for those two achievements to get 100% completion, but is it worth sitting through the entire game's length of repeated animations, in order to get there? Going off of the time Steam says I've spent playing this game, a full play-through can take about 7 hours. I care about 100%ing as many games as possible and I still can't be bothered to sit through the game 2 more times for that. Other complaints: 1) the sound effects (villagers shouting and monsters growling) are much louder than the music with no slider for music volume or sound effects volume. 2) the Menu is weird - it's very hard to figure out how to exit the game from the start menu. 3) the game saves at morning of each day but it's very hard to tell when exactly the save point of morning is. Also, would it have been so hard to make it save at any point in the day when you quit? This is clearly another feature existing to artificially extend play time, by forcing the player to redo and entire day they lost. The game is fine as an exercise in game design - The style of the game and the core concept of a village where wanderers trickle in seeking refuge really is what drove me to try out the full thing - but it should not have been released as a full, purchasable game. Because it lacks content and the player lacks any autonomy,

粗制滥造。

good gameplay

I liked this game a lot. It's got great graphics and a very relaxing atmosphere over all; the music and sound effects are very enjoyable too. The only thing I wish was changed.. or rather added, was a continued version of this game, like part 2. The game is great and I loved it, and I've replayed it so many times trying out different strategies and paths, so I really hope there becomes a part 2 added into this game, either with the same main character, or possibly we can be introduced to a new character and their story. Overall, I'd recommend this game as it is right now, and I'd buy it again if there was a part 2. Edit: I think that the format this game was designed in was very nice, and I'd really like to see a part 2 in the same format as the original. But I was also thinking, that I can see the game doing super well with some added story to it all, and maybe even some more cutscenes in the same art style as the game, that can go in-between the days, and bosses, etc. I feel like this game has a lot of potential if the developers would choose to continue with it. Anyways that's my 2 cents for now; loved this game.

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.