Play With Fire Demo

Designed by Chris Bateman, Play with Fire is a highly unusual platform puzzle game in which you play a giant ball of fire--and burn things down.

Bateman is something of a game design theorist, and the author of 21st Century Game Design. Play With Fire is, as a result, an unusual combination of a rigorous and theoretical approach to game design--along with a firm intention to create an easily graspable, intuitive game capable of appealing to a broad audience.

In Play With Fire you do three things: move, jump--and burn. Each level presents you with a structure composed of different kinds of materials, ranging from unburnable stone to a variety of others that burn more or less easily.

Somewhere in the level is an exit, and to get to it, you have to burn things in the right place or order to reach it. Sometimes, if you do things wrong, the structure will collapse as it burns and make it impossible to reach the exit; sometimes you must move quickly as the object burns and the fire spreads to get to the exit before the structure collapses underneath you.

Different materials burn at different temperatures, and you can increase your own temperature by starting a fire in a low-temperature material, then touching it, thereby allowing yourself to burn materials that require the next level of heat. Increasing your temperature also allows you to jump higher.

The controls are intuitive, and simplicity themselves: you move with the arrow keys, jump with Shift, and slam down at your current location with Ctrl. The challenge of the game lies in puzzle-solving, not interface mastery.

System requirements:

Windows XP

1.5GHz processor

512MB RAM

nVidia 5900, 128MB VRAM or ATi Radeon 9600

DirectX 9.0c or later