Bonfire Peaks

Bonfire Peaks is a gorgeous experience, with a multitude of puzzles that will challenge even the most hardened genre aficionado. The sense of completion is wondrous, and the voxel world is a peaceful one to work through at your own pace. You’ve been never been so utterly relaxed and completely infuriated at the same time. It’s quite the achievement.

As you approach the titular peaks, your brain will feel the burn more often than those boxes. But if you’re stuck on one puzzle, there are always others in each set to try. And in a final stroke of genius, the PS5 version offers Activity cards with short video solutions to all 200-plus puzzles if you feel the heat. With a moody score lending a distinctive, haunting ambience,2 this is one of the most satisfying, generous puzzle games in yonks. [Issue#7, p.90]

Even if the controls sometimes just make you wanna scream, Bonfire Peaks is a nice and small puzzle game worth playing. Its compact diorama levels are brilliantly engineered, using small spaces to test the player’s cleverness. Voxel graphics, more that just being nostalgic, help the game in recreating the right atmosphere of old adventure games like the original Tomb Raider.

While the puzzling itself racks your brain adequately, if frustratingly, the real pull of Bonfire Peaks is its ability to make you feel personal nostalgia through mementos—the memories that shaped you, both happy and sad. Topping it off with pleasant voxel pixel art and a rousing soundtrack, the game offers a distinctly unique experience.