Campfire

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 23 Sep 2024.

This is a short choice piece written in Ink, where you go on a camping trip.

I was surprised how long it took to get to the camping. The game opens with a work situation, and a sense of jeopardy, but this was rather left hanging and unresolved.

A major part of the game is trying to decide what to shop for before your camping trip. Very much a resource management thing. I wasn’t sure if I should keep money back for the trip. Or quite how much food I needed!

Unfortunately I ran into a nasty bug here, where in one of the shops (in the (Spoiler - click to show)camping store) the clickable prompt to leave the store vanished from the screen, so I couldn’t leave and move the game on. I restarted a few times, and it happened again. Eventually I managed to play through this bit. Though minimising my time in that shop! By this point I was also repeatedly saving, in case it crashed on me again.

When you get to camping there’s cooking to be done, and various activities you can do that night and next morning. It’s quite atmospheric, but hindered sadly by an awful lot of typos. Which with a text game really do jump out and distract the reader from enjoying the story. This game would very much have benefited from more proofreading by other people in advance. Either get family or friends to proofread, or perhaps even better ask for volunteers on this very forum to help before the competition. We are very happy to help! Because the typos were a major issue here.

I did enjoy the activities I chose to do during the camping trip. I felt as though I was packing quite a lot in to the time, and was getting some good vibes about the experience. But the immersion would too often be interrupted by typos.

At the end the camping trip is over, and you head back home. And it then just ends really suddenly. I’d like to have returned to the work plot, maybe the player has a new perspective after camping. Or something.

So a nice idea, but I hit a nasty bug, and there were way too many typos. Playtesting and proofreading are really worth doing, even for choice pieces. But I liked the concept. Still not sure how much I’d want to go camping though!

This was a pleasant accompaniment to the last game I played in IFComp, Birding in Pope Lick Park. Both games are outdoorsy, real-life games inspired by a love for nature.

This game, Campfire, is written in Ink and doesn't use images. Instead, it describes a camping trip in words that are often vivid and descriptive, at other times enthusiastic, and at other times merely routine.

You get to buy stuff for your trip, pack, and pick different activities. I enjoyed fishing and fireworks the most.

I ran into a bug where popping popcorn made my game just hit a deadend. But I was very close to the ending and saw the endtext in the game file. Overall, a pleasant, short experience that could be spruced up a bit with more feedback from players.

After raking Breakfast in the Dolomites over the coals for gesturing towards, but not actually providing, a grounded trip into nature, I was surprised to see that the randomizer picked another run at a similar concept for my next game. There are certainly differences – Campfire’s an altogether lonely, more rugged experience – but I’d say it largely delivers on the promise. While it’s been decades since I’ve gone camping, the game’s careful, low-key presentation of the simple joys of roughing it brought back long-buried memories, and made me want to go again. There are bugs and writing errors that mar the process, unfortunately, but the core of the experience still resonates.

There’s also more depth to the game than may at first appear. The opening that depicts you experiencing some minor crises at work as you count down the minutes until you can go on your trip, for example, appears to be randomized, with at least two entirely different sequences playing out if you restart. Similarly, rather than jumping straight to the camping, you first visit some stores to pick up your supplies, which requires carefully counting your money and deciding how to prioritize food vs. gear vs. entertainment (admittedly, I played the protagonist as a self-insert, and since I’m a vegetarian who doesn’t like starting forest fires, I passed up the expensive meats and fireworks, leaving me with plenty of cash left over when I picked up everything else). There’s a packing sequence that’s dull, but serves to build anticipation, and then the trip itself plays out in brief vignettes told in unadorned prose that’s perhaps a bit generic, but boasts a solid, simple cadence:

"The soft grass gives slightly under my feet as I walk the trail. A soft breeze rustles the leaves of the trees that blanket both sides of the trail.

"The fresh autumn air fills my lungs with each breath. Bringing a feeling of peace and relaxation over me.

"After a while of walking the trail starts to become hilly. I walk up a particularly steep hill and have to catch my breath.

"From the top of the hill I spot a small clearing in the distance. Two deer graze on the grass in the clearing."

Nothing that happens is especially revelatory; the game makes clear that you’re a veteran camper who loves the experience and finds a special kind of meaning in the freedom of being on your own in the woods, but this particular trip is just one of many. You can go on pleasant hike, make tasty food, catch a few fish (happily, the game stipulates that you immediately throw them back), and return to your weekday live rejuvenated, but this is a slice of life rather than a drama. That’s a fine idea in the abstract, and in its particulars it makes for an apt fit with the unpretentious gameplay and shortish structure.

As mentioned, though, some rough patches made it harder for me to drift away like the game was inviting me to. I know about the alternate beginnings because I had to restart several times: once after I bought everything in the camping store and got to a passage with no further choices, and then again after hitting a similar bug when popping some popcorn – and then a third time when I tried to reload a saved game, which instead brought me to an entirely blank screen. There are also a few times when lines repeat oddly, instances where the game seemed confused about what I’d bought or failed to buy, and a large number of misspellings and typos (some of which I’ve put behind a details tag, below). It’s all forgivable for a first-time author, though, and while each of these issues did momentarily bring me out of the meditative fantasy the game conjured, I was always willing to make my way back there; given my current life circumstances it’ll be a while before I’m able to go camping again, but in the meantime this is the next best thing.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

The choice to cycle the modern Dr.s Who… let me just pause to say I will pay 5 American dollars to anyone that can figure out where I’m going with this, relative the game in question.

The choice to cycle the modern Dr.s Who so quickly is kind of wonderful. It gives the titular actors the opportunity for wide and varied careers before and after their potentially typecasting prison. Personally, I stan for Capaldi but all of them are just dynamite in the role. I see the case for Matt Smith as the most interesting post-Dr., but honestly, it’s Tenant. I think we can all agree on that. (Time to lock down your guesses).

Among my favorites of his is the grim detective series Broadchurch. Playing opposite British National Treasure Olivia Coleman, he is a prickly dick of a detective. In a legendary piece of line delivery, at one point he inflicts on his co-star the savage bon mot “What is the point of you, Millah?” My entire household erupted at that. I am subsequently given to understand that maybe this is a common put down and NOT originally his, but in that transcendent line delivery, he claimed it and gifted it to all of us. “What is the point of you, Millah?” (in a butchered version of Tenant’s accent) has become a common jab in my home, dripping with overriding affection and shared joy not present in the original.

I give you this labored background so you have the full context of my meaning when I say, “What is the point of you, Campfah?” (So, who do I owe money to? No one? No one.)

This is, in its most basic construction, a camping simulator. After a prelude of draining workplace drama you shop, pack, travel, make camp, dither in the out of doors, then come home. There is no plot per se, no dramatic arc, no NPCs of note, just raw camping logistics. My affection for the chutzpah of this conceit may not soar to the heights of Tenant’s tour de force, but it echoes it. Like camping itself, the work presents no artificial dramatic constructs, it simply IS. What you get out of it is what you yourself derive from the environment and mechanics.

So, do you like camping? I do. And here is where I think Campfire falls short of its modest goals. The mechanics of camping are as routine as daily life. Prepare, cook, clean, maintain. The novelty of its rituals are what distinguish it from your daily life. By reducing camping to its mechanics, and not somehow capturing the novelty aspect, a piece of the experience is lost. I’m not here to suggest I know how to do that, only that it was missing.

A deeper disconnect is that, logistics aside, the true charge of out doors experience is reveling in the immersion in nature, from a perspective of being denied it for 95% of our work life. At its best, it can transform mundane routine with fresh vibes and bring joy where at home would be rote. I think the piece’s impulse to contrast the experience with the numbing one of daily work was the right idea. I think it made a misstep in execution though.

With few exceptions, even the most mundane repeated experiences are never EXACTLY the same in real life. Sometimes you struggle with toilet paper, sometimes you are mad at your family while washing your hands, sometimes your dog darts in front of the lawn mower and pulls you up short. IF authors can’t possibly capture this microvariation, and commands like ‘cook food’ inevitably get a single response of text, repeated verbatim every time the command is executed. In most cases, this is a reasonable compromise.

Here though, that compromise really undermines what is going on. When, say fishing, to see repeated text on its mechanics, then one of two stock responses based on success or failure, the experience becomes just as rote as hammering out a weekly project report. Without cues that these experiences are somehow transformed by the novelty of out of doors, they are reduced to the same numbing effect as the prologue’s workday. IF limitations make the joy of camping as joyless and repetitious as work. (To those who claim, “but my work is not joyless, it is my defining bliss!” my response is “screw you guys. You’re doing it wrong.”)

Now, maybe this joylessness is the subversive theme of the piece? Maybe the message is ‘camping is no escape, all life is drudgery.’ Yeah, I don’t buy that. This runs counter to my life experience in general, and camping in specifics. If this is the point of the piece, change my answer to “Thanks, but no.”

I don’t think it is though. I think it legitimately is what it presents as, a minimalist experiment with drama-free simulation. If so, I would recommend putting in work to provide a LOT more varied responses to each action. You’re choice-select, not parser, it’s doable. Try to capture the transformational effect of breaking with work-life and the wonder of nature. It is a fine line, I get it. You need to present scenes and images and not attribute emotions to the player. Let them do that. But it is doable. Then I think the work might realize its goals a lot better. Or at least THIS goal. Certainly, it might elevate it from the mechanical exercise it is currently.

Unrelated, it feels disrespectful not to observe that Jodi Whitaker (another Dr.) also murdered her role in Broadchurch. What a cast.

Played: 9/14/24
Playtime: 15m, complete
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

This was rather pleasant and I suppose plucked on my heart strings, since camping is one my family's traditions of which I am particularly fond and nostalgic. As for the game itself, I find this was simplicity done the right way! The way the prologue (whilst waiting to leave work) is set up pays off really nicely into the simple yet curious choices you are asked to make regarding what things you will pack and what activities you will do. 🙂 The descriptions were short yet thoughtful, and it's just made me ache for nature once again, as I find myself getting lost in all this constant, droning technology!!