Bonfire

Simple concept, yet surprisingly deep gameplay. Excellent writing. Looking forward to see how it develops in Early Access.

Bonfire Review This game has the potential to be a good game, but it has some SERIOUS issues that ruin the entire experience. I really tried to like this game, and feel like I gave it more than a fair shake. The simple fact is that this game is a very slow grind that rapidly becomes even slower. Your choice of characters is limited to the first three, and it feels like any deviation is severely punishing due to a loss in defense and/or healing. These limitations may be circumvented by grinding enough skill points to add effects to your abilities, but I'm not about to take the time to do that. Harder quests seem to be dependent on your ability to spam heavy damage or instant kill items. All other item types don't have enough impact to take. The mechanic of permanent damage is interesting, but often leads you into positions where you're pretty much doomed to die once your motivation meter becomes too hard to fill to reset your maximum health. With all these complaints, I feel like it'd be disingenuous to not make at least some recommendations: -Decrease experience required in the later levels dramatically. This game is fairly slow moving as it is, and speeding progression up a bit would definitely help this game out a lot. - Reduce the minimum amount of damage taken to 2 or 3. The bone snipers, and enemies that hit multiple times deal far too much damage, especially to high armor characters. Also, armor seems to be either overkill, or not worth anything, with little room in between. -Zhu's booby trap ability is stupidly situational, and needs a buff to make it better in more situations. Maybe make it more of a retaliatory ability that deals no damage, but prevents the next attack and stuns the attacking enemy. Nadia's riposte ability seems really weak, and I don't feel like it's worth keeping her exposed to counter a single attack when there is the potential that she could take significant damage after the riposte goes off. Maybe buff it by increasing the damage or allowing it to stack poison, and giving her a speed boost until it becomes her turn again. -Prevent maximum HP from dropping below 50%. Reduced health bars shouldn't be a death sentence for a run, especially early on. - Show more numbers during combat. It's a tactical RPG. The actions of the player should be calculated and exact; not reliant on guesses and feeling. This is also especially true when you power an attack with motivation. Maybe make a slide bar for how much motivation you want to expend, rather than charging it up and letting the player hope the amount used is enough to kill the enemy. -Make filling the motivation bar slightly easier, but it should only heal a small percentage of maximum health (maybe 15 or 20%), rather than healing back to full. -New heroes should join with 50% of average experience for existing heroes. Giving heroes that start at zero experience makes adding them to the party a severe hinderance, and prevents experimentation with party composition. -Buff items should be significantly stronger, especially items that only work for a few turns. They simply don't compare with instant damage items.