The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands

The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands est une belle surprise pour les amateurs de jeux de gestion et de survie minimalistes. Sous ses airs simples, le jeu propose une expérience prenante où l’on doit gérer un petit campement, attribuer des rôles aux survivants et faire face aux dangers nocturnes. L’ambiance est particulièrement réussie : la direction artistique épurée et la bande-son discrète créent une atmosphère calme mais légèrement oppressante. Chaque décision compte, surtout au début, ce qui donne un vrai sentiment de progression lorsque le village commence à prospérer. Le gameplay reste volontairement simple, ce qui le rend accessible, mais certains joueurs pourraient le trouver répétitif sur la durée. Malgré cela, le jeu brille par son atmosphère et son côté contemplatif. En résumé, The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands est une expérience courte mais immersive, idéale pour ceux qui recherchent un jeu de gestion relaxant avec une touche de défi.

While the ambient, minimalist style of the game is both unique and appealing, this game is entirely linear (not allowing any creative decisions in running your settlement at all) and drags gameplay out by impeding the movement speed of your workers very heavily. It's a whole lot of waiting around. Whole game feels a bit like a joke at the player's expense; it's an exercise in time wasting and hasn't got anything fun going on. There are some challenges like ''complete hardcore mode'' and ''don't lose a worker to monsters'' and the only way to actually achieve these is to handicap the progress of your settlement by assigning way more workers to guard than is necessary. I could go for those two achievements to get 100% completion, but is it worth sitting through the entire game's length of repeated animations, in order to get there? Going off of the time Steam says I've spent playing this game, a full play-through can take about 7 hours. I care about 100%ing as many games as possible and I still can't be bothered to sit through the game 2 more times for that. Other complaints: 1) the sound effects (villagers shouting and monsters growling) are much louder than the music with no slider for music volume or sound effects volume. 2) the Menu is weird - it's very hard to figure out how to exit the game from the start menu. 3) the game saves at morning of each day but it's very hard to tell when exactly the save point of morning is. Also, would it have been so hard to make it save at any point in the day when you quit? This is clearly another feature existing to artificially extend play time, by forcing the player to redo and entire day they lost. The game is fine as an exercise in game design - The style of the game and the core concept of a village where wanderers trickle in seeking refuge really is what drove me to try out the full thing - but it should not have been released as a full, purchasable game. Because it lacks content and the player lacks any autonomy,