Fire – First Impressions (PC)

Fire is a classic point-and-click adventure packed full of completely adorable graphics. The first thing you’ll notice is that everything has eyeballs. Rocks, underground creatures, even the trees. It’s all extremely captivating. I found myself just staring at screen watching a rock…blinking. Add to this flashes of dark humour and Fire looks like a fun game to play.

You control a pot-bellied Neanderthal called Ungh on his quest for redemption as he’s responsible for letting his tribe’s bonfire burn out. You see, he’s not the brightest Neanderthal. Fortunately, there’s a volcano nearby to provide lots of replacement fire.

Lying between you and the volcano are a shed-load of puzzles, all made up of various materials you’d find in prehistoric world. Rocks, Neanderthals, animals and plants. The key to puzzle solving lies in exploring every bit of these surroundings. Clicking on anything and everything and seeing what happens. It’s refreshingly old-school in its approach, including no puzzle hints at all. You are all on your own, unless you cheat and use the internet.

Puzzles are spread out over multiple screens so there’s a bit of wandering about involved. You also have control of the day/night cycle by clicking on either the sun or moon depending what’s up in the sky at the time. This day/night cycle is also critical solving puzzles as it affects the behaviour of animals and the weather. Clouds, for instance, only appear at night and can be made to produce on-demand showers by using a rain stick. Rain showers in turn make trees grow or can be used to fill up caves or hollows to reveal previously unreachable items.

The darker elements of puzzle solving involve ramming a coconut it up the sock-covered trunk of a sleepy dinosaur to create a powerful cannon upon yanking its tail and obliterating a Shamen with lightning.

The Shamen murder is part of the game’s first puzzle when you convince him to perform ran dance under an innocuous cloud. Upon starting to dance he gets blasted by a bolt of lighting, disintegrating him instantly into a small pile of dust with two little eyeballs plonked on top. Of course the eyeballs are staring right back out at you. His death allows you to snaffle his rain stick for your own personal use as he won’t be needing it anymore.

Fire is cute, cheerful, thoughtful and just a little bit evil. If you’re into your point and puzzlers look out for it later this year.

Fire is coming to PC and Mac in Q4 2014.