Blue Fire - Maybe Don't Be 3D Hollow Knight

Blue Fire is very far from a major release. It has been out since February 4th and has not gotten a ton of press. Like seemingly millions of games that come out every year, Blue Fire is a small indie B-game on the Switch. I only happened to come across it randomly watching Switch game trailers, which is usually how I find the weirdest games I have the most trouble talking about. The other day I bought some fucked-up PS1 nightmare for $4 that probably has cursed me to die horribly in a week. I don't think I'll review that one.

There's so much competition in the indie scene today, Blue Fire is lucky to stand out at all. The game is basically 3D Hollow Knight. That's an easy concept to sell, so I think this game has been more successful than most. (Total guess, nobody has access to sales data.) I found a pretty active discord around the game, so somebody is playing it. The developers were able to sell a few hundred plushes of game’s main character. However, Blue Fire is not a game that make will make many Top 10 Lists when the year ends. It has better hopes of appearing in those annual "10 Indie Games You May Have Missed" pieces.

I struggle with Blue Fire for a couple reasons. First of all, this game is just good enough that it should get a bit more exposure. Yet, Blue Fire is also not some obscure masterpiece that you’re missing out on if you only play the big hits. It is a game with potential but also with serious flaws. That leads me to the other problem. When I say Blue Fire needs more exposure, does it need that exposure from me? This might be the only time you will ever hear about this game, and it is coming from somebody who only kind of liked it. Well, I did love something about Blue Fire, just not the main selling point.

Blue Fire is a pretty okay 3D translation of Hollow Knight.That's all good enough, I guess. Instead, Blue Fire is actually one of the greatest 3D platformers I have ever played. That part just happens to be hiding inside a less-than-incredible outer shell. If you want a deeply challenging and rewarding game, its here in Blue Fire. Just not in the main campaign.

First off, I should explain why Blue Fire is not a masterpiece like Hollow Knight was. And really nothing ever was going to be. Hollow Knight spoils you. You're ruined for any other small game after an experience like that. Hollow Knight's developer, Team Cherry, were a tiny team of about two  people. Yet they made this full-scale epic Metroidvania full of gorgeous detail and charm. You'll never forget the game's tiny insect world. It is stunning how much content Team Cherry were able to sell for a ridiculously low price of fifteen US dollars upon the 2017 release. Games four times that price had far less to offer. In terms of how far your dollars can exchange for fun, Hollow Knight is the greatest value in video game history. You are asking never to be satisfied again if you demand every single  game be as good as Hollow Knight.

But the comparisons are unavoidable, aren't they?

Blue Fire is clearly a rip-off of that miraculous 2017 game. You're a tiny cute swordsman in a post-apocalyptic kingdom after some dark mysterious Armageddon. Neither game much explains who you are or what you're doing, the lore remains completely opaque all the way through. Dark Souls has had a huge influence on both games, and I'll be honest, I am getting tired of this style of game narrative Anyway, you defeat enemies and bosses, and maybe save the world? It's hard to tell, neither game has much of an ending. The only difference in Blue Fire is that the adorable NPCs you run into are not bugs, but they might as well be. I know Blue Fire wants to stake some claim towards being its own thing. But it does not help when the final boss 100% copied and pasted right from Hollow Knight.

I cannot find many details on Robi Studios. They are a first-time developer based in Argentina. I cannot guess what the budget of Blue Fire could be. But there was no way their game was going to have the scale and depth of Hollow Knight.

Making games in 2D is difficult, more difficult than we players could ever know. Making them in 3D is a whole order of magnitude harder. Blue Fire has had to make a lot of compromises to work in 3D. Where Hollow Knight's underground arthropod kingdom was this huge map full of locations, Blue Fire is about eight separate areas. Each level is so small Blue Fire does have a map and does not need one. You can make a maze in 2D and expect players to navigate it. In 3D, players will get lost constantly.

There's more compromises to come. Where Hollow Knight is full of bosses, including several optional fights and rematches, Blue Fire has six bosses in total. Three of those fights are pallet swaps of the same model. The first boss also is so easy I thought it was supposed to be a regular enemy. I was embarrassed for the game it thought that would be a challenge. Hollow Knight has dozens of unique enemies, Blue Fire has only a handful.

Then Blue Fire decided it also wanted to borrow a lot of ideas from Zelda. It wanted to recreate the dungeon formula of old 3D Zelda games like Ocarina of Time. The idea is that you travel from temple to temple, collecting the new powers inside and defeating the boss. Instead, Blue Fire has two, maybe three dungeons total. That's pretty disappointing already, and none of these labyrinths are exactly Twilight Princess quality. Zelda-style dungeons seem simple but they're actually intricate pieces of design. Very few developers can pull them off well, and again when you're working in 3D, its going to be infinity harder.

I'm not mad that Robi Studios couldn't make this fully work. Unfortunately this means that before the last third of Blue Fire, you'll have seen every location in the game. To fill up a solid 20 hour runtime, the developers took inspiration again from Zelda, this time Skyward Sword. The last few hours are about retreading old locations to find switches or collecting shiny glowing junk. There's no other way to put it: this is busy work. This sucks. 

Don't let Nintendo rewrite history, Skyward Sword actually is as bad as you remember.

Besides the overall over-ambition of this thing, Blue Fire has big technical issues. But before I complain about that, let be nice first because I feel like I'm being a dick so far. One minute, please. Visually the game looks great. The almost cel-shaded effect is a really smart choice. It well-translates Hollow Knight's hand-drawn cartoon-y look into 3D while not being so colorful as to drown out the moody tone. I like how quirky the NPCs are. One couple if reunited will even have a baby in seconds since biology works differently down here. That was cute.

Now to be a dick. Unfortunately Blue Fire was badly bugged on Switch, and would crash a lot. (There was a recent patch, that problem might be fixed now.) There are translation errors since this Argentinian team are not native English speakers. Several of the sidequests would not log as completed in the menus. At one point, falling damage "stuck" to me, so my character would walk two paces and lose more Hearts until he dropped dead. I fell through the floor once and right through a platform another time. That is not what you want from a game so heavily about jumping precision.

The combat is serviceable, but here's I become a bitter unpleasant jerk again and I'm sorry. The last bosses are massive pains in the ass. There isn't enough to the combat to justify this kind of difficult and healing is too slow. You can be bounced around by damage after damage with no way to escape or recover your flow. I feel like I never had moves to really take on these fights. There's one sword combo, a shield, and one unsatisfying ranged attack. Healing is also possible, but as I said, it is very picky as to whether it works. If you move at all, it fails, without visual indication as to why. So when the fights become really fast-paced by the end, your only hope is not to get hit. 

This led me to become so infuriated with Blue Fire. So much so my very nice roommate upstairs screamed at me to shut the fuck up and stop making noise. (She was well-warranted in this complaint, and I'm sorry.) The combat is good enough but never fun. All the real technical skill lies in the platforming. Which is a good hint that maybe this fast-paced swordplay action was not really what Blue Fire should have been about. 

We've been eating the terrible dry fries at Shake Shack this whole review. Let me finally get to the juicy smash burger. Blue Fire is was split between two ideas of what it wanted to be. There's the obvious Hollow Knight inspiration behind the combat and story and general vibes. But there's also the main side draw of the game, which is not very Hollow Knight at all. I wish with Blue Fire that the developers had focused more on this side of the equation than the other. That's the platforming.

This game features an optional quest to play challenge levels in exchange for Heart Pieces. These are called "Voids". Heart Pieces are actually pitiful rewards in Blue Fire. By the end enemy attacks routinely hit for four or more hearts, so even with a nearly maxed out health bar I died constantly. Really, the Voids are their own reward. This is the part of Blue Fire that rules. This is what this engine was really built for. Much less love went into the swordplay, but a ton of love went into the jumping. The game wants to jump, not stab.

Tragically you need to stab many times to see credits. That is almost not even worth it. Just finish all the Voids and be done. Trust me. The ending is not worth anything anyway.

I can tell this game wants to be more of a platformer by looking at its general progression. It is not progressing towards more combat moves. When you start Blue Fire, you have two tricks. You can jump and you can do a dash. The Zelda dungeons do not reward you with new attacks, they reward you with more jumps. You learn a parkour wall run in the first dungeon, and later a double jump in the second. There's a whole Charm system (lifted again from Hollow Knight) which are all mostly more advanced jumps. You get longer stamina for the parkour, a triple jump, the ability to hover off platforms briefly, an extra boost, higher jumps, longer boosts, and even Link's Up-B sword spin from Smash Bros. You may never be able to fight the bosses all that gracefully, but you can dance acrobatic circles in the air around them at least.

The Voids in Blue Fire go from simple to maniacally evil. You'll start just by jumping from platform to platform. Then you have spinning stages, moving platforms, platforms that crumble under you feet and then finally pure Hellish nightmares. There's buzzsaws, blades on pendulums, floors full of spikes, and lasers shooting in all directions. Most of the time you have to complete these challenges flawlessly. The Voids are long, with demanding a dozen or more stunts to complete. You fail once, you're starting over. The latent traces of Dark Souls in Blue Fire's DNA leave this game with very little mercy.

Much like a truly great Mario platforming level, every stage has one major idea. Ura's Glide, for example, is all about following a platform as it floats along the level while jumping around walls blocking your path. You can do this with the starting jump abilities. Out of sheer stupid bravado I tried it out without the double jump. That was not easy. It was doable, but those were long troublesome days of my life. This stage is also very long and you're one miscalculation away from falling into a white oblivion and a painful death for the tiny little swordsguy. His little body is taking a lot of punishment on this journey.

But I love that I had the choice to do Ura's Glide the hard way. I could have saved it for later, come back with all the jumping skills, then have sequence broken my way around it with ease. The Voids give you enough creative freedom in your jump sequence to solve the challenges multiple ways. A later Void, Oriane's Saw, features spinning blades on the walls that you need to avoid. You can time out their movement and wallrun around them. Or if you use the swordspin and a few jumps, you can avoid the walls entirely. There's just enough space that you can solve the problem in a way you're comfortable with.

The thing is, Oriane's Saw was far harder than any of the bosses. But I wasn't angry. I wasn't unhappy. I wasn't disappointed. My roommate didn't come down to yell at me for being an asshole. I was in love. This is what I want. I want to be punished by a legitimate and fair challenge. I didn't care if I failed. I think I wanted to fail. Platforming just happens to be my punishment kink of choice. The bosses of Blue Fire were miserable unfun bullshit. The dungeons were undercooked gameplay ideas. The Voids though? These are the real heart of the game. I could spend the rest of my life working hard on mastering that one sequence of absolutely perfect motion through the Void. Even I'll admit that these levels are too damn long and should have at least one checkpoint somewhere. But I never felt my time was wasted with the Voids.

Blue Fire wanted so badly to be a 3D Hollow Knight. And I understand. That's a very pithy and easily understood elevator pitch. It is what excited me in the first place to buy this game. But Blue Fire's engine just does not make a good Hollow Knight. It is as comfortable being Hollow Knight as I am being social after three hours at a party. Blue Fire instead wants to be parkour and jumps and amazing feats in the sky. And I want more of that game. There are few great 3D Metroidvanias, but there are just as few great 3D platformers not called Mario.

Instead of 3D Hollow Knight, Robi Studios should have focused on making 3D Celeste.