Blue Fire (PS4)
Blue Fire seems to be a game described by its comparisons to other popular titles, but many of them don’t accurately encapsulate the heart of the experience. It is compared to Dark Souls because the player loses all their currency on death but can retrieve it if they can return to where they lost it, it is compared to the Legend of Zelda games because it features dungeons that have locked off doors and an item that allows you to explore it better after you acquire it, and it gets compared to Hollow Knight for being an exploration-focused platformer that mixes together a dark atmosphere with cute character designs. While all these are true pieces of the experience, what Blue Fire truly feels like is a 3D platformer where the entire world is your oyster when it comes to utilizing your abilities to explore, although it doesn’t truly start off that way.
Blue Fire begins with its mysterious hero awakening in a floating castle called Penumbra. A mix of light and darkness, the hero may be the only means of helping to stop the corrupted gods and queen of this land, but while the focus of the game will later reveal itself to be platforming, the opening area doesn’t provide you with many tools for movement. You have a jump and an aerial dash, and while the opening areas don’t ask much out of you in regards to utilizing those limited tools, Blue Fire can give a bit of a bad first impression because of it. The platforming starts off mildly challenging since it can’t yet push you too hard, so combat ends up getting perhaps too much of a spotlight for how unexceptional it is.
While you do have some battle options like a parry and positioning is important to avoiding heavy damage, the fights don’t have too much substance to them. Some enemies can seem to hit you in ways that don’t look like they’d work, and players who come to the game looking for the involved duel-like conflicts of Dark Souls will probably be turned off by these rough skirmishes where it’s often not even a good idea to lock your camera angle onto a foe. However, the creatures that inhabit Penumbra, despite sometimes being sturdy weapon users who take quite a few hits to put down, don’t actually seem to be meant to provide engaging battles. Instead, their purpose is realized more as you start to interact more heavily with the platforming action, the navigation of large and dangerous spaces enhanced by enemies who can complicate things. Laser firing floating heads force the player to keep moving, exploding slime monsters can throw you backwards into a trap or knock you into sewer water, and some creatures shoot out pulses of energy that you’ll need to constantly hop over while also trying to safely leap from platform to platform.
When serving the role of obstacles for the platforming, the enemies do find a niche that better suits them. As you start to get upgrades to your weapons and skills enemies can often be dealt with much more quickly as well, so actually killing a pesky creature won’t take too much time provided you can reach it and avoid whatever tricks it has. Boss encounters seem to take a while to find their footing as well, the first few actually rather tame and hardly looking like a step up from regular creatures despite them throwing out more attacks. After the first few though bosses start to become more about using your expanding jump abilities to weave around attacks that focus a lot more on denying space with actually hitting the boss more of a formality compared to the work you put into avoiding their abilities. Like the regular enemies, once Blue Fire starts to be more true to itself and embraces its strengths, the previously tepid bosses are replaced with ones who better suit the heavy 3D platforming focus.
Blue Fire really elevates itself once you get the double jump, and with abilities like a wall run and and spin attack jump increasing your ability to navigate a 3D space even further, you really start to find that Penumbra is an exciting place to explore despite its sometimes dreary atmosphere. One thing in particular that makes exploring so interesting is how you can find ways to reach areas before you have the ability meant to make reaching them much easier. Getting to upgrades early by deftly managing how far you can travel in the air, where you start your jumps from, and how much stamina you use for your wall runs begins to tap into concepts the game will begin to embrace more and more with the area design being the main focus. Timing your movement and using the abilities right becomes key to surviving important areas and your tool kit is large enough that you can find your own ways to navigate while the game itself isn’t being too cryptic in how it presents possible paths if you aren’t feeling too adventurous. However, the game does stoke your curiosity early with powerful items just out of reach, and when you do take a return to trip to an earlier area it’s immensely satisfying to move around it fluidly to gather those tantalizing treasures.
The main adventure does provide many little tests for your platforming skills even disregarding how much potential there is for you to open things up more with your own creativity. However, the Voids are the true platforming gauntlets, these little areas of subspace taking the hero to a challenge that truly demands platforming excellence to pass. While you can still sneak a few tricks into some of these, much of the harder ones especially ask you to jump at precise times, dodge tons of danger, and have quick reflexes to survive. Some of these can include climbing floating towers covered with spikes and saws where the only safe spaces are walls, dodge pulsing energy rings by hitting midair jump refreshes just right to slip through, or running across spinning walls and making sure to jump only when they’re lined up just right. Earlier Voids are more merciful and can help to cultivate the budding platforming prodigy you’ll need to be for some of the harder Voids. In most areas of the game falling into the abyss or dangerous substances will respawn you nearby with a health penalty, but Voids are at least merciful in that they won’t remove any life for failure even though you will be set back to the start of the gauntlet. This definitely alleviates some of the potential frustration as you learn the more complicated designs and make it the kind of trial you can easily throw yourself into again and again until you come out the other side. The camera can sometimes be a little fussy so managing it almost becomes part of the challenge and not always in a good way either, but beating Voids will not only grant you an extra heart for your fairly limited life, but the little collectibles you can find inside them can go towards the game’s Spirit system.
Beyond just weapon upgrades with their simple strength benefits the player can eventually unlock and equip Spirits. Spirits are often hidden fairly well or require a good amount of the game’s currency, Ore, to purchase, but they can provide some incredibly beneficial passive effects. Some like increasing the amount of Ore you collect can pay off quickly while others like not taking any fall damage makes navigating the large and open environments less risky. It can be hard to gauge how helpful some will be, the Spirit that heals you after you kill an enemy providing so little that there’s practically no reason to equip it while one that boosts the strength of your aerial attacks is probably fine to have equipped despite its low increase simply because aerial attacks are so useful in combat. Perhaps predictably though the area where Spirits really shine is when they begin to augment your platforming abilities, doing things like increasing how much stamina you have for wall runs, increasing the height of your spin attack jump, or extending the distance your dash travels. The collectibles found in the Voids actually go towards purchasing more equipment slots for your Spirits, the game really seeming to become about mixing your own skill with your customized augmentations to truly navigate the world as best you can.
The visual design does give the game a gloomy look where it wants to but vibrancy can be found in environments like the lush Forest Shrine or the lava-illuminated industry of the Steam House. A reddish purple taint can be found splattered across ruined medieval interior spaces and the ethereal blues and whites of the Abandoned Path and Utha’s Temple can add an eerie element to a world that feels almost left behind. The story is often scattered about through things characters tell you or implications in the world design, and unfortunately the ending is rather abrupt since the main quest seems mostly to address the fundamentals of the world rather than any intricacies. You can find more details in the side quests, and oddly enough, a lot of Blue Fire’s side characters are rather cute or have amusing personalities. Side quests can unfortunately sometimes boil down to just finding the right item or character elsewhere, but since some of them do involve rewarding you for fully exploring the large spaces of Penumbra thoroughly they at least spice things up more than just leaving treasure chests laying around.
THE VERDICT: Blue Fire gets off to a fairly weak start and the battle system never really feels like its merits are found in the fighting side of the conflict, but once you start to get a few extra skills for navigating the world better, Blue Fire becomes a playground of difficult yet rewarding exploratory platforming. The atmospheric setting of Penumbra provides many trials that test your ability to chain together techniques and manage your slowly growing repertoire of movement options while also rewarding players who can think outside the box in how they utilize them. Hidden goodies encourage you to get really creative with how you link things together or upgrade your character and Voids serve almost like exams testing how good you’ve become at moving around skillfully. Once you start getting the tools you need to embrace the game’s true strength, Blue Fire’s platforming easily pushes aside its other small problems and settles into that big strength until the finale.
And so, I give Blue Fire for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD rating. Blue Fire’s early game really feels like it can put a player off simply because it lacks the elements that really show its potential. Having to wait to get any extra midair jump means early on you can only really jump and dash through areas that aren’t able to really test the player yet. Once you start grabbing your new movement skills though suddenly Blue Fire is a game full of opportunity, the player given a canvas to test their boundaries and customize how they can navigate it. Fights suddenly become more interesting because they’re now allowed to test how well you can move, and the Voids begin to pull out the stops to really show of their own creativity in challenging your simple but flexible tool set. It’s a game where the puzzles are often simply about finding out how to move around correctly to activate the right switches or reach the right areas, and your expanding skill set allows for multiple approaches rather than arbitrary restrictions. The sensation of finally finagling your way up to a hard to reach area only to find a treasure chest or one of the cheeky golden ducks hidden around to acknowledge your work in getting somewhere special shows the developers specifically want you to find out how to explore the nooks and crannies of Penumbra, and that encouragement allows the game to thrive during the areas designed to test them. They can be made easier if you manage your options well but are rarely trivialized by them, so while Blue Fire may not have every element gel together behind its greatest strength, it still provides some excellent fun for people interested in an exploratory precision platformer.
Blue Fire really should be approached for its own merits rather than squeezed into the boxes its common comparisons imply. Almost none of them really encapsulate its true appeal and instead shift expectations in the wrong direction, especially with an open set of areas that doesn’t yet make it clear what the game is going for when you’re just starting out. Once it finds what really wants to be Blue Fire becomes much more engaging as it provides enjoyable challenges for the story path and plenty of rewarding activities for those willing to test their limits and chase their curiosity. Its uneven nature means it can’t quite earn higher praise, but once the ball gets rolling on the intricate and interlinked platforming mechanics, Blue Fire definitely proves it’s still has something work checking out.