Cozy Fireplace Review

First Impressions

Cosy Fireplace is best described as, well, a cosy sort of game. With the title not hiding the fact it’s going for a relaxed gaming experience. Simple, gaming fun is the aim of this game, with a steadily increasing difficulty to the puzzling levels. The game is also more easy 1000G Gamerscore if that’s your thing too. As the full cheevo list can be completed by as early as Level 13. So not even a full playthrough of the game is required.

Plot

The plot to this game appears to be simple, but not specifically mentioned. From what I can gather, your little fire sprite is on a mission to light up all the mini bonfires in his fireplace home by sliding the conveniently placed charcoal into them. Why this is his mission is never know, but puzzle games like these rarely give you a description of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Gameplay Overview

The start menu consists of only three options. The obvious ‘Play’ that allows you to select any of the 30 Levels to play (once you’ve already played them, you can then replay them). But once a level is complete, there’s really no need to replay it as this will not add anything extra to your experience.

‘Options’ allows you to adjust the Main Volume, Music Volume, Sound Volume and change the language from the default ‘English’ setting. Like so many of these little titles, there’s only one tune that plays throughout the whole game, that quickly can become tedious as variety is the spice of life as the say. Finally, ‘Credits’ scrolls through the game’s developers and all the people who worked on the title.

As previously stated, gameplay for Cosy Fireplace consists of you making your little fire sprite bump move along squares one at a time to bump purple charcoal blocks into unlit bonfires in an effort to, well, ignite them. Once all bonfires in a level are lit, the game moves onto the next level. With the levels themselves increasing in difficulty and complexity. Obviously, things start off easy, but quickly become challenging. Often requiring the player to think a few steps ahead and four dimensionally. There are rules to the levels also, you can’t move past a piece of charcoal, and once a bonfire is lit, you can push the charcoal off in another direction. Anyone who’s played any block sliding puzzles or the statue mini games from Super Lucky’s Tale will get the strategic logic behind the gameplay loop very quickly. Sometimes you have to plan ahead and think about your next move before you do anything as it’s very easy later on to get stuck and soft locked as there’s stones and other wooden obstacles on each level, often blocking your path. Like a chess match. Fortunately, each level has a ‘Restart’ option using ‘Y’ and a ‘Undo’ option with ‘B’. Restart, as the name suggests, restarts the whole level from the beginning, while Undo, literally undoes the last move you made, with multiply presses of ‘B’ systematically undoing every move til you’re back to a place you can work from.

Presentation

The games is presented in a warm, colourful pixellated art style, semi overhead view of a fireplace, with your character starting on one spot on a tile and moving one tile at a time in four directions. The level backgrounds do change slightly from level to level, but still retain the same basic design.

Once you complete the level, your character does a cute flaming hair flick and the next level commences immediately with no break. This enables you to burn (no pun intended) through levels at a steady pace once you understand the game’s mechanics.

The Bottom Line

To recap, Cosy Bonfire on the Xbox offers small, bite-sized levels of gaming goodness. Perfect to relax after a long day without getting into a sweeping epic of a game. But the steady increase of difficulty will ensure that some of the levels you play will provide a suitable challenge to your brain.

For the paltry sum of only £4.19 on the Xbox Store, the game provides a fun, engaging, but short-lived experience that will only really appeal to Achievement Hunters and puzzle enthusiasts alike in the long run.