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.