Before officially beginning the review, I’d like to say that I played the Switch version of the game, and the review is based solely on this version.
Game Background and Description
The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands is somewhat of an idle, survival game created by the indie masterminds behind Xigma Games. The original version of the game came out in 2018 for pc but it wasn’t until mid 2022 that it dropped for the Switch. The game already has a second part that's available for pc. Accompanied by a delicately stunning artwork and great sound effects, the basic premise behind The Bonfire is to survive for as long as possible until you face the final boss and beat the game. The story is simply and cleanly written, along with some descriptions, as you're playing.
Your journey begins when you arrive at a desolate snowy field. There, you build a cozy, welcoming home next to a bonfire and the adventure begins. Slowly, you begin meeting strangers and wanderers looking for a place to call their own, and in turn? They want to help out the settlement as much as possible. As you keep progressing, your settlement will grow and you'd be able to build new places, craft items, send explorers out and even assign workers to decipher ancient texts. But be warned, as night approaches beasts will attack the settlement and, in some cases, kill some of your workers. If you and the workers manage to kill the beasts, your settlement is saved for another day.
Controls and Game Mechanisms
Before even beginning your adventure, you must make a very important decision and that is the level of difficulty to play on. There are two difficulty modes: normal and hard. The main difference is that in hard mode, death is permanent. In order for you to better understand this, let's go back to night and the attacking beasts I mentioned above. If the beast(s) kills you, it's "game over" and your settlement survived until then but if you're playing on normal, you get the option to replay that day again and prepare better before facing the beasts again. This is what sets the difficulties apart. If you die in Day 16 (like I did the first time because real life distracted me) and you were playing on hard, then you'd have to begin from Day 1 all over again.
The game offers 5 different tabs that you unlock as the settlement grows: actions, builds, craft, workers, and trade. Let's take a moment to look at each of these tabs.
- Actions - the name literally describes what this tab does. This is where you control your character and "help" out gather resources or fight beasts.
- Builds - here is where you go to create new structures around the map. These structures are then placed automatically on the map.
- Craft - need a weapon? a cart for food? some armor? how about a ship? You guessed it, this is the place where you craft everything.
- Workers - you have a handful of jobs available that go anywhere from wood picking, to exploring, to fighting, to even studying ancient texts found in discovered places. Each wanderer that arrives will have a certain skill set and personality which you will help you determine the best place for them to work in. The workers can get hungry, tired, sleepy and die so be careful on the roles you choose for each.
- Trade - Once you're mostly settled and you've sent some workers to explore, a new option appears to trade some gems or stones for other items like food, supplies or even scrolls containing mystic wisdom.
The controls for the game, while easy and quick to learn, feel non-intuitive and unnatural. Basically there is no "back" button for the tabs. Let's say you're equipping the guards with new swords, instead of being able to go from guard to guard, you equip the sword for the first one, then have to go back or forth a tab, then back to the workers tab, search for the guards again and look for the second guard who's gonna get the other sword. If it sounds like torture, it's because it was.
And while I found no way of doing anything about that, the game presents you the opportunity to use the "touch" feature from the Switch to move between tabs and actions. There were opportunities when this worked great but I preferred being able to use the controllers, even if the integration wasn't the best.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Availability. The game is openly available on most devices, including mobile so for those that want an alternative "on the go", they have this option.
- Opportunity to continue and make it to the end. I spoke about this earlier when describing the difficulties. Having the chance to continue after "dying" lets you think about what you did wrong and look for ways to change it.
- Game autosave. This could either be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you're playing. For me, it felt like a blessing. Every sunrise, the game saves so if you have to suddenly leave and close the game, you'd only have to replay the current day.
Cons
- No info on roles or which tools/weapons/armor combos go with each role. There is no information available in game that tells you exactly what crafted items go with each worker category, unless they are required items like the torch for guards or the ship for explorers.
- The controls. I've already said I didn't like the control setup and the fact that there is no "back" button.
- Can get a bit boring after a while. After a couple of days and your settlement has grown, around mid/late game, you can get stuck which could make the game feel boring since you're basically doing the same over and over.
Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, being 5 the absolute best)
The game can run for as long as you want. Mine seemed glitched as I got to day 43 and still couldn't upgrade the settlement, was stuck with 30 workers and had to literally fight my way around to see just what I was missing, which led me to do some research and I found some gamers finished as early as 36 days and some as late as 58 days. Without giving too much information, the last boss felt like some sort of upgraded rock-paper-scissors game. You play for days (in game) yet the final battle is over very quickly. I was expecting more after it, a cutscene, some closing story but nope, you get your stats for the game and sayonara, that's it.
Having mentioned this, the game feels like it offers really no replayability, unless you're really into this kind of games. I had really high expectations that felt short and unmet. I did enjoy my time playing, for the most part but found myself staring around looking for other sources of engagement until night hit and I was ready to fight beasts. Also, since this was played on Switch, all those sweet achievements that you can get, I missed out on, so for me, it's a pass. I'd be down to try it on pc and see if anything changes out of curiosity though.
For more information about the game, you can visit their official website.
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