Precision platforming challenges are often an absolute delight in video games. They're a combination of finely honed movement, masterful platform placement, and a series of clockwork elements coming together to elevate jumping puzzles to something beyond the norm.
Mario games know this well and slowly increase the difficulty as the game progresses, knowing that players will acclimate and rise to the challenge as they master their avatar's moves.
Blue Fire is a good shot at replicating the euphoria that comes with nailing sequences of perfect jumps, dashes, and wall runs. It derives its structure not from Mario but from Nintendo's other mainline series, The Legend of Zelda, and adds an unnecessary dash of Soulslike difficulty for no discernible reason.
Blue Fire Review: A Dash Too Far
Introducing you to a small masked character with two swords and a quick dash, Blue Fire also features z-targeting combat, magic attacks, and a set of unlockable spirits that work similarly to Hollow Knight's charm system, allowing you to step up certain aspects of your moving game.
The story is quite simple: a calamity has befallen the world while you slept, and you woke up to a dark force encroaching on the castle you call home. A knight named Von says that as a warrior of shadow and light, you are the one destined to purge the shadow world by freeing the goddess.
This task requires you to find three benevolent spirits located in temples reminiscent of the puzzles of Zelda. Soon after, the quest evolves, requiring you to find and defeat three different evil spirits, shifting the game from platforming to combat.
Unfortunately, that's poor, as the fight doesn't do Blue Fire any favors. It's a miserable mesh of simplistic enemies with poor combat cues and bad hit/damage feedback that makes the whole thing feel like it falls short.
While the platform is far preferable, it also has its issues. Progression isn't heavily telegraphed, which seems to derive from Souls-style world design, but when paired with difficult jump sections, it's hard to tell if the lack of progress is due to difficulty or to a lack of capacity.
A memorable hour saw me trying to climb a tall tower full of challenging wall jumps and wall runs only to give up and wander the world for a while. I then came across a door that led to a dungeon, which then gave me a double jump ability that made the tower trivial.
Given that some of the platforming sections before this were dictated by trial and error – asking me to mix jumps, dashes and wall runs in a harrowing combination – such a lack of random direction is frustrating, especially when the traversal is incredibly rewarding when it works.
Sending out your dashing avatar and double-jumping is responsive, and conquering challenges is often its own reward. Some of the best come in the form of “voids,” discrete platforming areas of varying difficulty suspended in a featureless void. They really test your platforming mettle and are almost brilliant, but they all seem to last too long with no checkpoints.
You can make it to the last jump and mess up, and you'll be kicked back from the start. It's a frustrating sequence that doesn't play well with the game's finicky wallrunning controls, and it's exacerbated by spikes and jigsaws that will also send you back to the start at the slightest touch.
Blue Fire's last big sin is its reliance on ore to buy spirits and unlock checkpoints. The latter is particularly confusing, as you have no way of knowing what unlocking bonfire-style shrines will cost. Just like in the Souls games, you drop your ore where you die, so if you wear a piece and drop the ghost, you're often in a perilous place.
I've arrived more than a handful of times at a shrine without enough money, only to die later and be sent back to a much older shrine; saving and returning work was rarely interesting and was more arbitrary punishment than anything else.
A prevalence of bugs also hampered my experience, with numerous desktop crashes, unresponsive instances of commands, and enemy contact rag that pushed my character into bottomless pits. At one point, the game even allowed me to sell over 70 pieces of ore despite my wallet only being able to hold 000 ores. He didn't refund me the other 2, so I had to load a previous save.
That's not to say there's only one place to sell ore as far as I know, so the need to teleport to a specific area to earn money to buy better wallets and unlock shrines means there's a lot of unnecessary backtracking. It's more disconcerting when you consider that each region has its own merchants.
These aren't game-breaking issues, but they're sticky enough to stick in my mind past the end.
Blue Fire Review – The Bottom Line
Benefits
- Clean and crisp aesthetic design
- Rapid response platform
- Lots of secrets to discover
The inconvenients
- Messy and callous combat
- Lack of direction sometimes
- Checkpoints cost money for no real reason
- Plethora of crashes and technical issues
The presentation of Blue Fire is clean and elegant. It's clear that a lot of care and love has gone into the lore, the writing, the music, and the overall design of the game. But sadly, the mechanical parts aren't really tied together.
There are plenty of interesting ideas at work, but they just can't elevate Blue Fire above a curiosity. Bugs aside, I'm hesitant to recommend it to anyone but the staunchest platformer fans.
[Note: ROBI Studios provided the copy of Blue Fire used for this review.]
