I, The Living Flame

I, The Living Flame is a puzzle game developed for the GameBoy Color.

The core game is a reinterpretation of the classic „Theseus and the Minotaur“ logic-game: The player controls a girl that has to find a way through a dungeon maze while collecting notes and evading an angry Minotaur that chases her. You have no way of fighting back; the enemy has double your speed, so there is no way of escaping in the open field either – instead, you have to use your wits and get him stuck within his own maze. The Minotaur is rather dumb, and his behavior is explained in a small tutorial when starting the game – nonetheless, the whole thing gets rather tricky, especially towards the end of the game, as some of the levels put you into quite a peril.

The games aesthetics are great: Abstract images are shown between the levels, the texts and the title are somewhat cryptic – the overall atmosphere is mystic, occult, and mythical. Coherent, tasteful and very well made pixel art is used, and the smashing music track carries the game easily over the playtime. All of this combines to a very unique, atmospheric dense, and coherent playing experience. „I, The Living Flame“ is probably as artsy as a non-abstract 2D Gameboy puzzle game can get.

The game was created for and released under the name „DOMINO CLUB„, a collective for anonymous game jams. Consequently, no more information is available about the developers of this game, but it is surely worth to dive into the other releases available there.

„I, The Living Flame“ can be played in your Browser or downloaded as ROM. Worked without problems using OpenSuse Leap and Firefox.