As the Fire Dies

This was enchanting. The game begins by asking your name, relationship status, whether you have children, and if you fear death. None of this comes up again, but the last question does set the tone a little: what horrors, mysteries or enlightenment will be found here?

You find yourself lying beside a fire on a starlit night, beside a forest, and your only task is to feed the flames. And then you sleep …

You find yourself in a dreamworld made up of strange images. A tree that turns out to be made of bones. A distorted mechanical model of the solar system. A giant, knitting a sweater. As you observe the world around you, you interact with it, solving puzzles, and moving the story onward, until you emerge in another dreamworld. But your time spent in each is strictly limited: you can’t let the fire die, back in the real world, or you will die too.

Writing open-ended puzzles in Twine is always a challenge, because a parser game puts the onus on the player to figure out what to do next, whereas choice-based games, with their link text, essentially tell you what your options are. The way to provide a bit of a challenge is to require the player to complete the right actions in a certain number of turns, or to flood them with so many options that finding the right path is difficult. Although this is a short game, I think it does a good job at making you think about what the right action is, and in the later rounds, I did find myself getting stuck quite a few times. The bizarreness of the dream logic meant that it’s not always possible to figure out rationally what the best next step is.

I felt that more could happen in the waking world: rarely are you expected to move around or undertake any actions in it. Overall, though, I loved the thoughtfulness behind the dreamworlds, the places the story got me to imagine, the dreamy atmosphere.