Bonfire Peaks: Complete Edition

Gentle storytelling and challenging puzzles on an island of intrigue.

An atmospheric world with deep, absorbing puzzles, Bonfire Peaks is thoughtful and charming-but without establishing its tricks, it risks leaving less fluent puzzlers behind.

Throughout the summer of 2021, I was desperate for the quiet autumn nights. Wrapped up in my newest blanket addition, with a pumpkin spice candle glistening on the mantlepiece, was all a gal could dream of.

Bonfire Peaks is a stunning game that I feel will attract many for its aesthetic alone. A large portion of those will stay for the gameplay, but I can fully relate to players who become frustrated with the movement controls and difficulty spike later on. Aside from the gameplay grumps, the world in which Corey Martin has created tells an isolated yet beautiful tale of a man looking for closure by burning his things, and I am glad I got to experience this.

While the puzzling itself racks your brain adequately, if frustratingly, the real pull of Bonfire Peaks is its ability to make you feel personal nostalgia through mementos—the memories that shaped you, both happy and sad. Topping it off with pleasant voxel pixel art and a rousing soundtrack, the game offers a distinctly unique experience.

Bonfire Peaks tries a little too hard to make relatively simple concepts seem deep and meaningful. The narrative of the unknown man is too laconic to be engaging in the long run. The gameplay, while delivering brilliant moments of discovery and achievement, is too repetitive. The two only connect in a meaningful way because of their lack of complexity.

Bonfire Peaks has you burning memories in a tricky puzzler that has real heart and soul at its molten core.

Burn it. Burn it all! Your belongings, that is. New puzzler Bonfire Peaks sees you navigating dozens of levels to reduce your possessions to ash. Don’t let the eye-catching voxel art deceive you, though: this is one rock-hard game.

Even if the controls sometimes just make you wanna scream, Bonfire Peaks is a nice and small puzzle game worth playing. Its compact diorama levels are brilliantly engineered, using small spaces to test the player's cleverness. Voxel graphics, more that just being nostalgic, help the game in recreating the right atmosphere of old adventure games like the original Tomb Raider.

A puzzle game whose quality is matched by its challenge. But Bonfire Peaks also deserves not to remain a niche rarity for fans of these games, its way of introducing the player to its world, its simple and intuitive control, the learning curve and how satisfying it is, is something open to people. You will solve in a few steps that damn puzzle that made you retire the day before frustrated, I assure you.