Flame Keeper

Genre: Action / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Flame Keeper + Space Cows bundle, along with Space Cows.)

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales.)

Flame Keeper is an Isometric Action game with Roguelike elements released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023. In this game, players take control of Ignis, an anthropomorphic piece of flaming coal tasked with heading out into a dark wilderness filled with malicious creatures and feeding pyres to take back the world from the forces of literal darkness.

Given the role that fire, light, and darkness play in this game, it will likely come as no surprise to hear that the lighting is decent in this game, though it’s nothing truly extraordinary, with some fairly detailed environments with a slightly-cartoony look to them. This is backed by a cinematic-style instrumental soundtrack that works well for giving a note of drama to the game. Overall, there’s nothing especially impressive here, but for a $12 game, this looks pretty good.

A standard run in Flame Keeper has players heading into a series of randomly-generated levels where you start at a flaming pyre and must collect lamps to surround the pyre, and then fuel those lamps. Everything is powered by fire in this game, which makes for some interesting choices you’ll have to make – you need to use fire to unlock the lamps before returning them to the pyre, you need to use fire to feed those lamps once you do, and you need to use fire to open any treasure chests you come across. The thing is, fire is also your life force, so you need to be careful not to give up too much, or risk getting snuffed out entirely by the next enemy you fight.

While clever in theory, this becomes tedious in practice – you’ll need to be going back and forth between sources of fire and things you need to fuel, with a difficult enough enemy encounter meaning that you may have to seek additional fuel sources, and in turn risk more battles that could further reduce your health, and so on. Yet, you have a maximum amount of fire you can store on your person (er, on your coal?), and any others are left laying around, usually to be picked up by scrounging scavengers. So it’s not like you can load up a good haul of the stuff, and every time you leave some laying on the ground it feels like a waste of a resource you’ll need later.

It’s not that fire is limited in supply – over time, the game replenishes both trees that you can bash to get more of the stuff (in this game, fire literally does grow on trees) as well as the enemies you fight, which sometimes drop it when defeated… but this just means that you’ll never truly clear an area and you’ll constantly be fighting your way through enemies. You could just run past them, but that means they’ll swarm you when you reach the spot you need to get to. Oh, and you won’t get much depth from the combat here. Expect a lot of button-mashing.

To the game’s credit, it does something a bit different every few levels or so to shake things up, with what serves as boss battles in the form of a Tower Defense section where you must defend a flaming pot from oncoming monsters, but can once again spend some of your own fire to power various traps surrounding the pot. It’s a wonderful concept, but it unfortunately still suffers from the game’s repetitive combat and the constant feeling of grinding permeating the game.

The one other element you can look to for some relief from this grind is the game’s Roguelike elements, where you can spend resources in between runs to gain permanent upgrades to your power and abilities. This is helpful, but unfortunately the progression here feels a bit slow, and there aren’t nearly as many options as I’d like.

Overall, despite its flaws, I still like Flame Keeper. It has an appealing aesthetic and some of its core concepts are intriguing. Unfortunately, those same core concepts turn the game into a grind-heavy ordeal that doesn’t quite fulfill its fiery promise. If you enjoy Action Roguelikes and this game’s presentation appeals to you, you may find it worth giving a try. However, I think there are better alternatives out there, even if they don’t have quite the same mix of elements as this game.

tl;dr – Flame Keeper is an Isometric Action Game with Roguelike elements where players take the role of an anthropomorphic piece of flaming coal fighting dark creatures and trying to return flame to massive pyres. There are some interesting ideas at the heart of this game, such as a system where players must use their own life force, fire, as a currency to unlock progress. However, these interesting elements usually just make for more tedium as you grind to refill your fire over and over again. This game isn’t without its charms, but you have better options within the genre.

Grade: C

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