Fire Place

In short

Fire Place is a simulator in which your one and only goal is to start a fire and let it burn. Released on the Autumnal Equinox 2018 (21st September) it celebrates the spirit of this season. At the same time it offers to the open-minded gamer an opportunity to let go all of the ideas of what a game should be or not be and just relax.

PROS

+ 7 Different environments
+ High level of customisation
+ Promise of free updates by indie artists
+ Chill atmosphere if you're open to it

CONS

- Inaccurate controls
- Limited amount of items you can use on screen
- Surprisingly challenging for your hardware

Gameplay

It's all about starting that fire. If you've never done that in real life, you'll find yourself wondering what you are supposed to do, somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of items you can choose from. And also by the fact that you can scale up the balls of paper and wooden logs almost indefinitely.

However given some patience, you'll find out in no time. Throw a few balls of paper into your designated fire place, throw a few matches on them, pile logs up on top all of it. Watch the fire burn. That's it. And of course throw in some more logs when you think the fire might start burning out.

Now you know how it works and want to see how big a fire you could possibly make? Not possible. There's a limited amount of items that can be on screen at the same time. Start crossing that amount and items already on screen/involved in your fire start disappearing. You could only build that huge bonfire by using massive logs.

Also, the highly inaccurate controls stand in the way of what could be a perfect little experience.

You don't only want to build a fire, but build a fire that is somewhat aesthetically pleasing to look at? Forget about it. You have no direct control whatsoever on what direction the wooden logs you want to throw on your fire turn. They simply follow a pattern of turning left and right/ up and down you can't possibly figure out.

Rearranging your fire is also very difficult. When using the tongs, you only have a vague idea which item you're going to pick up next as there's no indication whatsoever (e.g. crosshairs). Using the poker is just as frustrating because you need to turn the camera in order to reach something that isn't straight under your nose.

However, once something strays too much to the side because you poked it too much, you can't reach it anymore, which is also hindered by the fact that you're limited to about 220° movement range in front of the fire. It would have been a lot better, were it possible to walk 360° around the fire.

Presentation

There's a total of 7 different environments (levels, so to speak) you can start your fire at. For starters there's 4 environments the developer Badru says have been reconstructed from his memories: a northwestern forrest setting, a beach, an old brick fireplace, and a stucco fireplace located in a house.

The other three environments have been created by featuring artists Zoe Vartanian, Pol Clarissou and Galen Drew. Each of them has created something using their own specific styles, ranging from a cozy apartment to an arcane wizard hall to something vaguely resembling hell.

All 7 environments come with an own set of background noises and pieces of music created by Michael Bell. According to the developer there are more environments to come from more indie artists.

On the aesthetic side, Fire Place looks well most of the time. Graphics are nice enough with (mostly)high definition textures. Almost every technical aspect is entirely customizable. From sound to how the fire is simulated and rendered. In my experience I had to tweak the settings each time I switched to a different level in order to not only see the fire on a dark screen but also parts of the background.

Performance

Apart from a crash the first 30 seconds after I started the game, I didn't experience any major technical issues. Framedrops only arise once you start putting too many items on screen. The only thing that surprised me was how hot my laptop's fans could get from only simulating a semi-realistic fire.

Summary

If you look over the flaws (inaccurate controls, limited item amount) you're in for a relaxing time. As the developer puts it “It's meant to be a chill place“ or “It's meant to make whatever place it's in more of a chill place“. If you can't look over the obvious flaws, you probably won't enjoy yourself much and will regret paying the full price.

Speaking of which: Is Fire Place worth it's price? Kind of, it's a very niche experience. It's supposed to be a game/simulation and yet it works the best once you forget any intention to completely control what is before you. Paying full price here is more like donating to a promising developer that is truly indie.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend Fire Place to the general public. It's far from perfect to warrant a definitive recomendation. The idea may be nice but the controls are doing the whole experience no good. Were there more comfort functions, one could focus a lot more on the experience only.

This product was reviewed with a key provided by the developer for free.

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Absolutely love it. So fresh. Taking wood and leaf litter and carefully constructing a campfire is something that takes time to learn, and is absolutely a skill. Fire building is a very satisfying experience, and is a wonderful idea for a game. It's oh-so Zen, and really thinks outside the box.

Pros:
+Price point is appropriate
+There are a ton of rendering and simulation options; they did it right
+It looks beautiful
+Very chill experience

Cons:
-I think there is still some room for more 'stuff' in here
-Maybe could use a little more precision with where/how you place things
-I wish I could manually angle the wood

Just a neat indie experience.

This review is mainly for the benefit of the developer, resulting from my experience of my first 30-40 minutes with it. If you're interested in this simulation, my recommendation is just go for it. It's cheap and steam allows you 2 hours to decide on a refund. See if you can figure it out. I... sort of did, and that's the detail I go into below. Long story short: You might have to spend some time figuring it out. Don't expect to jump in and be able to immediately get a proper fire going. Especially if you're inexperienced with real life firemaking and don't understand all the configuration settings in the menus.

So anyway, yeah. This simulation. I think I know what some people are struggling with. That one negative review had a youtube video attached and I skimmed through some of it and I think he didn't fiddle around with the simulation settings. When I first opened the game I struggled to get a fire going, too. I went into the settings and fiddled around. Quite a bit, until it seemed like pieces of paper and even wood was suddenly catching fire completely at random. At that point I waas able to get a full fire going. I couldn't understand what the hell happened. I closed the game and reopened it to start again and see if I could get a fire going "normally." I ended up fiddling around with settings some more and restarted the game again. At that point I was able to get a fire going without much difficulty at all. I don't know if I just figured out how to start a fire or if changing my settings made it easier to do so in the first place.

The problem with this simulation as it turns out happens to be a few things. First - apparently it's really hard to tell if your system specs are able to run it properly - that the negative reviews so far have been responded to by the publisher with "looks/sounds like a graphics problem, please feel free to refund the game if it's not working for you." If even the publisher (maybe developer, too, I haven't follwed IWG closely enough to know precisely what's going on with this indie group) can't tell what specifically is wrong, that lends to a bit of an issue. It'd be good to actually know if the player has done enough that they should see a fire, which brings me to my second point.

Second - It seems a tutorial for making your first fire would actually be beneficial. I know a trailer of the sim was released showing 10-15 uninterrupted minues of a fire getting started and going on for a bit. I don't remember logs sliding around as much in that trailer as they do in my sim but who knows, maybe it's my graphics processor (GeForce GTX1060- though apparently I might not actually be running the sim off my GPU, I might have to figure that out, in which case I guess I'm running it off my intel i7-8750H CPU?) In any case, knowing for sure that the player can get a proper fire going would help a lot in determining what their issue could be.

Third - there aren't any tooltips or guide for the simulation or render settings. I fiddled around with both of them trying to figure out how to get the fire started as well as once a fire was going how to get it to look the way I wanted it to look. Clearly there's a difference between simulation and render settings but someone less familiar with the concepts (simulation being how the program determines where there's a fire, heat source, how the logs/paper/matches are burning, etc while render settings pertaining to how the fire looks once it's actually going) could have a very difficult time knowing if the things they were changing actually was having any sort of effect on their experience. I still don't know what most of the sim settings do, but I'm interested enough to continue to try to figure them out. I was at least able to get a fire going, even if I'm not entirely sure how. I can't tell which settings were even the default ones necessarily so I can't determine whether I actually just learned through trial and error how to get a fire going with the program or if it's just because of my messing around with the settings that I was able to start the fire at all.

In summary, there's a few things that have been overlooked with the release of this program/simulation/game/whatever. I like it and will keep it just because I appreciate the novelty. Also I like fire. Also I seem to have it working *well enough.* Also I've liked other releases by Ice Water Games so I'm biased. I just think that a bit more work needs to go in to help more people who are going into this with no firemaking experience and uncertainty of what the simulation expects out of its users. Obviously I recommend it, ultimately - but there's a few issues and it seems to be tough to figure out which one any particular user is actually facing.