Welcome back to Indie Game of the Week, Giant Bomb's longest running ongoing feature (that's wild, huh? Not that it's an official one or anything). I don't talk about my process in selecting new games here too often, but I'm sure I bring up my inadequate PC every chance I get: I actually had to dismiss several games this week simply because they're not optimized for a slightly(!) out-of-date PC. So, in a rare moment of impulse purchasing, I went and bought The Last Campfire yesterday as it was on last year's shortlist of GOTY candidates to check out. Developed by Hello Games, presumably as a break from No Man's Sky updates, The Last Campfire is an emotional story about a little cloaked figure named Ember on a pilgrimage who is temporarily waylaid when their boat sinks. While looking for a path forward on foot, Ember discovers other cloaked figures like them who have stalled in their journeys also; some have even given up hope entirely, becoming stone-like figures referred to as the Forlorn.

Because my brain is busted in a very special way, I immediately picked up the game's inspiration being a lesser explored aspect of the world-building of FromSoftware's Souls series. Yes, I absolutely went there and as soon as the second paragraph no less, but The Last Campfire feels like one of those sentimental Indie games based entirely on the "hollowing" concept of the Souls games: that you can keep trying the impossible while you still have the will to continue, but the moment you give into your despair you become a mindless husk. However, Ember won't let these poor souls suffer for long: each one can be brought back to the land of the living and corralled to the nearest campfire by solving an environmental puzzle. These puzzles tend to be the usual Zelda type stuff: push blocks onto switches or to create bridges, redirect lasers with mirrors to hit targets, dodge wind and water to keep a fire lit, and so on. Ember also acquires an item fairly late that lets them move certain blocks around telepathically, which is involved with a number of the later puzzles.

In terms of progression, you're introduced to a moderate-sized area with a central campfire and a number of different directions to explore packed with secrets to find and barriers to overcome. There's seven of the Forlorn hiding around each area, though you only need to "cure" four to proceed onwards. There's a few puzzles in-between these areas also, but the meat of the game is exploring these campsite zones of which there are three total. It's not a long game, but it feels packed with content: each of the Forlorn puzzles cuts away to a self-contained diorama-like puzzle stage and there's more than twenty of them total, not to mention the overworld puzzles that bridge them together. The player can also find diary entries of a mysterious wanderer - these usually better hidden than the Forlorn - which obliquely refer to upcoming puzzles, characters, and local points of interest.

With a game like this, though, a lot of the focus is on the presentation. Each campsite environment has a lot of incidental detail; Ember can even comment on some of the more notable items in the surroundings, even if they're not always all relevant to puzzles. The lighting effects and character animations are top-notch, emphasizing the desolation of the strange world Ember finds themselves in and giving life to the many humanoid and non-human entities Ember encounters. The lithe and colossal Forest King is a particular highlight: a soft-spoken avian tyrant that inspires fear and trepidation in Ember each time they meet. Ember is also followed everywhere by a melodic Welsh voiceover, who narrates the game and the diary entries as well as the dialogue directly: the gentle delivery feels like she's reciting the story to a child as a bedtime story, especially when she puts on slightly different voices for the other characters.

In contrast with its charming aesthetic, The Last Campfire is ultimately an allegory about life and death. About how we choose to meet our end, whether we embrace it, futilely attempt to cling onto life by any means necessary, or give into total despair in the face of annihilation. A universal path we all must follow, but not one anyone generally wants to think about outside of funerals or hospital beds or any similar scenario in which our own mortality is made abundantly apparent. Couching such macabre semiotics in a wholesome little cloaked guy's trek across the wilderness bringing hope to others is certainly one way to ameliorate the bummer vibe it may have otherwise provoked, I suppose. If 2020 made us think of anything, it was about how finite life can be. Especially if you don't wear a damn mask.

On the whole, I enjoyed my time with The Last Campfire as it emphasized two qualities I don't get to see too often in Indies: A) detailed 3D environmental puzzles, and B) thorough exploration. The three campsite areas aren't particularly complex or massive - there's no in-game map, and it doesn't really need one - but they're designed well in how they hide their secrets or require a bit of work to open up new paths to the Forlorn or have helpful shortcuts to unlock everywhere (as if the Souls connection wasn't strong enough already, though I'll admit I may be reading too much into that). I'll admit to getting stuck a few times, if only briefly, so the puzzles have the right balance of difficulty and experimentation: those cutaway puzzles are never so intricate to be an issue for long, though if you really don't feel like taking them on there's an option to skip them all. Just a solidly made game with a saturnine, if hopeful, message about the great beyond - and we didn't even need a year of patches and free updates to get there.

Rating: 4 out of 5.