Monday Mini’s: The Last Campfire game

Hello friends!! Welcome to Monday Mini’s, where today I will be talking about the video game, The Last Campfire!!

Ok, so if Townscaper is my anxiety go-to, then The Last Campfire is my brain’s serotonin happy place. I’ll get to why below (it’ll probably be half of my review), but this game is honestly just serotonin with puzzles.

Also, I realise that I seem to have a ‘type’ when it comes to cozy games. If you know of a game where you play as a spirit, or help spirits, or spirits are somehow involved ― let me know! Because I will play the shit out of that game. Also, now that I have (finally) upgraded my 8 year old iMac to a Mac Studio, I’ll be playing a lot more games from Steam, as opposed to waiting for them to come out on the Switch. YAY!!

If you aren’t aware, I’ve been reviewing a bunch of COZY GAMES that I play. Cozy Games are low-stress games that have little to no combat, and really don’t require any gaming expertise or knowledge. Button mash all you like. The games themselves are predominantly story driven, and are just generally cute.

If you’re interested in previous games I have reviewed, please see below:

Graveyard Keeper
Unpacking
Spiritfarer
Cozy Grove
Untitled Goose Game
Cat Cafe Manager
My Time at Portia
Townscaper

So, let’s go take a look at The Last Campfire!!

Mini game review: The Last Campfire

Title: The Last Campfire
Developer: Hello Games
Release date: August 2020
Players: 1 (single player only)
Platforms: Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Windows, iOS, MacOS
Genre: Puzzle, Adventure, Indie
Steam link

The Last Campfire:

The Last Campfire is an adventure, a story of a lost ember trapped in a puzzling place, searching for meaning and a way home.

There are a number of things that I absolutely adore about The Last Campfire. The story is beautiful. The animation is gorgeous. I love the characters. And I love the difficulty of the puzzles. But the thing that I love MOST is the narration.

Which, I freely admit, is actually a really weird thing to love most about a game. But hear me out. The narrator (Rachel August) speaks all of the text in the game in this beautifully, soft French accent. It feels like you are being lulled to sleep with this ethereal fairytale ― and I am 100% here for it. In fact, I’d like to low-key lure Rachel to my house with delicious pastries and request that she read my entire TBR to me. I would pay her a lot of money. Seriously, her voice is that soothing. I bet she’d even make Midnight Sun sound good.

Right, but back to the game itself. The Last Campfire  is 100% puzzles and finding items. You play as Ember, a lost ember / spirit who stumbles upon this world, where they find other lost embers / spirits. Some of them are trapped within their own thoughts and melancholy and it’s your job to find the way out for them, and then shepherd them on to the next place.

You could absolutely do this on a speed run if that’s your thing. You don’t have to save every ember. But as a 100% completionist, I absolutely would not move onto the next stage until I had rescued every ember, and found every diary entry. The whole game took me just over 8 hours to 100% complete, and that included going back and figuring out the maze level where I had ONE diary entry to find. The platform of the game means you can run all the way from the end to the start and then back again in about 15 minutes. Unless you get lost, like I did.

I will say, the only puzzle that I needed help for was the jumping stones that fall because I literally had no idea how that worked. Even after looking it up on YouTube, I still can’t explain how that pattern works. I was stuck there re-doing it for over 20 mins before I rage-cheated. But the rest was fine, with some being a good level of tricky.

If you’re looking for something cute similar (but shorter) than Spiritfarer or Cozy Grove, or you just love puzzles (think Zelda-level hard), then I can wholeheartedly recommend The Last Campfire game.

Have you played the game, The Last Campfire?