2235: Give Flame Over a Go with This Month’s PlayStation Plus Games

Idiots, as we all know, love complaining. And some of the loudest, most complain-happy idiots are those who whinge about the monthly games on offer via Sony’s subscription service PlayStation Plus.

For those unfamiliar, PlayStation Plus is a service you pay a monthly fee to for, among other things, the privilege of playing multiplayer games on the PlayStation 4 platform. Unless you’re a die-hard multiplayer gamer, though, the far more attractive things that PlayStation Plus gets you is discounted prices on PlayStation Store digital downloads, and “free” games every month — I put “free” in inverted commas since you only get to keep them for as long as you keep paying the subscription; they deactivate if you stop paying, though you can get them back again by resubscribing.

In recent months, the aforementioned complain-happy idiots have been very keen to point out that the monthly games on offer have tended to err on the side of smaller-scale, independently developed titles rather than triple-A games, the latter of which were originally positioned as a selling point for the service. However, I actually prefer things this way around, since it gives me the opportunity to give games a go that I’ve perhaps liked the look of, but not enough to want to drop £10-£15 on them at the time.

Enter Flame Over from Laughing Jackal, a firefighting roguelike that I’ve had my eye on for a while, but somehow never got around to picking up. This month, it’s one of the PlayStation Plus games, so now I don’t need to agonise over whether or not it will be a worthwhile purchase for me: I just have a copy for as long as I’m a PlayStation Plus member, and since it’s a digital download-only game, it’s not a game I feel obliged to pick up a physical copy of — I do love my physical copies, as regular readers will know — because a physical copy doesn’t exist.

As it turns out, Flame Over is a very good game indeed and I should have picked it up sooner, but oh well; I have it now.

Flame Over casts you in the role of a firefighter with no visible eyes, a big helmet and an impressive moustache. It’s your job to enter a 16-floor building with your trusty hose and extinguisher, put out all the fires and rescue as many people and cats as possible before… well, dying. It is a roguelike of sorts, after all, so yes, despite the cartoonish, slapstick visual humour, the overall tone is oddly bleak, if truthful: fire doesn’t care who you are, and it will kill you if you don’t respect it.

Gameplay is simple and reminiscent of a classic computer or console game from the 8-bit era. You have a ticking clock, you have a maze-like level to negotiate — randomly generated, hence the “roguelike” descriptor — and you have high scores to beat, here represented as money that you can subsequently spend on powerups and permanent improvements to make your future runs a bit easier.

Putting out fires is a simple case of squirting them with your hose or extinguisher. The hose has a longer range and makes things wet so fire is less likely to spread, while the extinguisher covers a wider area and is the only way to put out electrical fires, which are prone to flaring up again after you’ve put them out once. You can also completely negate electrical fires by finding the fusebox on each floor, but this will inevitably be beyond a room that has come to resemble one of the lower circles of Hell, so you’ll need to clear a pathway through first.

The interesting thing about Flame Over is that it makes things deliberately just a little bit awkward for the player to keep things interesting. The camera angle isn’t quite top-down, which means that things on the “bottom” wall on-screen can often be hidden, necessitating rotation of the camera in order to make sure you haven’t missed anything. This is an additional thing to think about in the heat (no pun intended) of the moment, and with flames flaring up all around you, it contributes considerably to the rather wonderful growing sense of panic that the game creates.

That timer is a distinctly old-school touch, too; you can extend it by rescuing people, and when it runs out it’s not immediately the end of the game: rather, in a manner somewhat similar to seriously old-school games like Spelunker and Bubble Bobble, running out of time triggers the appearance of a difficult to avoid (but absolutely avoidable) enemy who will immediately end your game if you come into contact with him. In this case, said unavoidable enemy is Death himself, further driving home the game’s point about mortality.

Oh my goodness me is it an addictive little bugger, though. It’s simple to play, repetitive, sometimes awkward and regularly frustrating — but it’s fun. It’s a “pure” game, designed not to tell a meaningful story or make bold, sweeping sociopolitical statements; it’s a game designed to test your skills and patience, and as someone who grew up with games when they were nothing but tests of your skills and patience, Flame Over feels like a rather wonderful callback to those good old days; a game that, were it not for its 60fps 1080p polygonal graphics, would probably have been eminently at home on the Atari 8-bit computers or Commodore 64. And that is absolutely a compliment.

So anyway. Next time you’re disappointed that PlayStation Plus isn’t giving you a free copy of Call of Duty or some other such shit, take a moment to check out the things you might not have heard of: you might just find yourself pleasantly surprised by the charming games on offer, and discover some new favourites in the process.