Review (2025 August)

Blue Fire (as "BF" afterwards) is an unpopular indie game, with world exploration, platformer mini games and BOSS fights. Like many great indie games, BF is far from being perfect with some credible goods and obvious bads.

Apart from a few areas and BOSS fights, BF has a chill and quiet vibe (lack of exciting music) like its name suggests. The controls and movements will take some time and effort to learn, as some will only get unlocked as you progress. But overall smooth and manageable, which is very crucial to clear some areas, platformer levels and BOSS fights.

• World Exploration: The exploration part in BF is overall relaxing and fun. Sometimes a tricky item has multiple ways to obtain, pure play skills or smarter strategies, your choice. That said, some parts of the world have very weird designs and need more polishing.

• Platformer: Platformer levels are the key selling points in BF, where some are lenient and others more challenging. But overall manageable and no where near torture. Every level is unique with some smart designs. Of course as those levels are in 3D, your movements are heavily dependent on your sticks if using a controller. Cheappy crappy controllers usually have some drifting sticks, which can make the levels harder than they actually are. That said, having a nice controller and utilising all the movements with some play skills, challenging those 3D platformer levels will be a unique and great journey.

• BOSS Fights: BOSS fights are the worst of the three in BF, disappointing! Because the movements in BF are very strong and flexible, a general strategy to every BOSS fight is transforming the dynamic fights into turn-based ones. When a BOSS attacks, wait to dodge and then counter during the cool down. The fancy combos are not that important, comparing to focusing on the movements. Removing all the attacking movements, BOSS fights are inferior substitutes to the platformer levels. And how to make the BOSS fights harder? An invincible barrier. Now you have to break the barrier first to deal damage, which indeed makes the fights harder by making it longer, but such a bad idea. Previously you can counter at the end of every turn, now every 5 turns. The same strategy still works effectively, considering its low risk and fair return, but will make those fights incredibly long. Or you can try some aggressive strategies, with a lower success rate unless you optimise every movement. Comparing to the smart designs in the platformer levels, the BOSS fights are bad, very bad. I think simply removing this whole feature can make BF a better game overall, though that will also change the storyline. So it feels to me that the BOSS fights are there just to support the story, reasonable but a bit silly.