As the Fire Dies

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/11/25
Playtime: 30m, 2 fire dies, finished

This was a tight, light puzzle fest, exploring the interactions of waking and dream realities. As a relatively compact link-select work, it enabled ‘lawn mowering’ through its variations as a near default gameplay style. This is not necessarily a negative thing, especially if the aim was not ‘punishing logical challenges.’ Which it is not. Rather, the centerpiece of the work is its really wild dream scenarios, so ushering us through them all is the goal. Lawn mowering is a legitimate way to accomplish that.

This is a work that glories in the randomness of dream logic. Embracing that is to embrace a very specific challenge. True randomness is both hard and unsatisfying. A True random generator in your music player would occasionally deliver the same song, back to back, perhaps more than once. Despite it being ABSOLUTELY random, it FEELS less random to us because… pattern! No, the trick to satisfying-feeling randomness is to absolutely inform subsequent selections with prior ones, if only to DISTANCE from them.

This is also hard! It is not enough that you come up with an amusing random scenario, it must also explicitly NOT resonate with any prior scenarios. The more you create, the harder that gets. Here is where, I thought, ATFD succeeded most unambiguously. The scenarios were delightfully whimsical, hilariously specific, and admirably broad both in setup and solution. They didn’t quite flow together in a dreamy stream of subconscious, but were successfully random FEELING.

Stitching through this dream journey was a ‘real world’ need to keep a fire burning so you don’t freeze to death. This part was.. less compelling? The campfire setup was kind of light in tone, noting you want to keep warm but refraining from any dire admonitions. When the worst does happen, it is reported pretty impersonally as well, not really providing tension, uniting the work, or providing any thematic utility. It’s fine, try again! I don’t think I would be looking for ‘super realistic, tragic death’ in this work, that would feel just as out of place. Just some stronger linkage between the two gamestates.

That said, there is one sequence of dream scenarios that ABSOLUTELY play off the waking state in a neat twist on the formula. Definitely needed, as otherwise the waking state quickly becomes drudgery that must be endured, away from the dreamstate showpieces, to keep the game going.

Overall, I found this to be a light, pleasant affair, not too challenging, delivering an amusingly large array of nifty mini-scenes. Geez tho, I wish I could fall back asleep as readily as this protagonist does. I get up to pee, I struggle, nevermind playing with fire!

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Slumberland
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : This dreamy, multi-scenario conceit is crying for graphical playfulness. If this were my work, I would spend some time pulling the work away from Twine Sugarcube (I think?) default esthetic. It kind of flattens the technicolor dream worlds being presented, and even simple changes in font and color would emphasize the waking/sleeping differences much more impactfully.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

This game was entered into Spring Thing 2025. In it, you play as someone near a fire in a cave. You are going to sleep, and going to dream. In the dream, you explore a fantastical dreamscape.

A recurring feature is that you continually have a timer and you die if you don't periodically wake up. I don't know what intended play is but I just woke up and stoked the fire after every choice, and used the 'back' button if I ever selected a choice with no new options.

I'm going to look at this with 5 different criteria:

+Polish: I didn't encounter any bugs and the writing was smooth and typo-free.
+Descriptiveness: The world seemed vibrant and interesting (in dreams).
-Interactivity: I didn't really enjoy the frequent waking up mechanic. It did pay off at one point, which was cool, but most of the rest of the game felt like I was just repeatedly scouring the options till something changed.
+Emotional impact: The game was amusing and the dreamscapes made me feel whimsical.
-Would I play again? I did feel kind of frustrated with the waking up thing, and the ending felt like it lacked a little weight.

Note: This review was written during Spring Thing 2025, and originally posted in the intfiction forum on 7 May 2025.

This is a charming short Twine-based piece, where you have a fire to tend, and dreams to explore.

It’s episodic, with light puzzles at each stage. In addition you need to keep that fire burning …

The writing is strong and richly imaginative, and I felt thoroughly engrossed and charmed in the world.

I played for about half an hour.

Thank you to the authors.

The writing is solid, in a game which takes you in a dream featuring various environments, where you have to work your way to solve a puzzle to get through each stage.

Still, much of the puzzle largely involves visiting different areas, obtaining a certain key item to unlock another area, and so on, until you unlock the final task in a key area and move on to the next stage. Brute forcing your way through the puzzles by selecting as many options as you can could also get you through most of the story. Still, a few of the sections require you to think and read the text clearly to get through, so some challenge is there. It's not overly difficult or complicated, however, which is a plus for me.

You will also have to repeatedly wake up to feed a fire, or it's game over, but it still felt more like tedium to pad out the gameplay rather than an interesting part of the puzzle.

It's a short and fun bit of entertainment, and the undo option also means you can't really lose, since it's possible to rewind back to an earlier stage of the game. It's good for a bit of entertainment.

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.