Fire: Ungh’s Quest was something I grabbed as part of a bundle out of curiosity. The game’s graphics seemed alright, and the whole thing was short and supposedly funny, so how could I go wrong?
Well, the answer is that this isn’t actually very funny, and the core gameplay is simultaneously simplistic and obtuse. This combines all the worst parts of adventure games with often very lackluster humor, and for all the art that goes into the characters, the animation often feels very low fidelity and “cheap”.
The game is about Ungh, who wanders through ten stages of adventure game puzzles in search of fire for his tribe. The game is not terribly long – only about two and a half hours to 100% it – which is a good length for something like this. But the game itself just is rather dull.
The problem is that the game does a bunch of wacky referential humor, which doesn’t really land a great deal of the time – it feels a bit lolrandom at time, like they just wanted to stick more silly stuff into the game. And while that’s okay, it isn’t really that funny – a lot of the humor comes from the references (and referential subversions), and while they’re not terrible, they’re not great, either. I didn’t actually laugh out loud once throughout the game, it all felt a bit obvious to me, like the sort of humor that maybe a little kid might find funny.
Meanwhile, the puzzles, while not terribly difficult, can be a bit obtuse at times – a few of them require you to go back and forth a great deal, and the solutions aren’t always that logical (like feeding a caterpillar to a butterfly, despite the fact that butterflies aren’t carnivorous). Most of them aren’t that hard to solve, but some will take longer than others; even if you’re not great at puzzles, you’ll still likely be able to muddle your way through simply because there’s just not that many actions to do at any given point in the game.
Overall, the game, then, fell short for me. Nothing about it really made me want to tell anyone to go play it, or share it with anyone else. It’s just one of those mediocre works that just kind of *is*.
1.0