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!