A fantastic journey!
Great puzzles with a storyline, I suggest it to everyone!
10/10

Bought it mostly to see what hello games is up to beyond no man's sky, got surprised with a fantastic little game, with pleasing visuals, fair puzzles and a neat story, my only gripe would be the clunky keyboard controls, it definitely feels like an afterthought in certain interactions and so a controller is advised for the best experience.
Recommended if you are looking for a calm and interesting game.

The Last Campfire is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is from Hello Games, who are certainly gyrating around in their trajectory as a business. First, they mislead customers into thinking No Man's Sky would be a multiplayer game at launch (which instead launched the humorous epitaph, "No Man's Lie". Of course, and this gives them great merit, they went above and beyond to deliver multiplayer and many other features to the game. Possibly the best recovery in modern day gaming history.

Unfortunately, it seems they decided to knife all that goodwill by turning into a mobile game developer then throwing mobile apps at Steam to try pollute the place. Did they learn nothing about PC gamers in all that time since the infamous No Man's Sky interview? I guess not. Regardless, while this is probably one of the better mobile apps ever to disgrace Steam, that's what it is. It was designed for iPhones. PC gamers don't want to play mobile apps. Remember Blizzards famous "You all have phones, don't you?" speech? Hello Games doesn't. And so here we are.

Now, for a mobile app the production values for The Last Campfire are okay. But, and this shouldn't be a surprise, the puzzles are uninteresting, but this is because this game was designed for iPhone gamers, not PC gamers. And again, that's a real problem.

You guide an "Ember" through an underground complex and various ruins and other environments, and solve a bunch of pathing and other puzzles. There's flavour text collectibles that add to the backstory but it really isn't great.

There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre cutscenes in this mobile app. So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but watching extremely poorly made cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with Netflix for your time. We're here to play games, not watch hours of garbage intersituals.

From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the mobile app unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

The mobile app features low-polygon "retro" assets with cartoony, mobile app style shader effects, making this look like a barely functional mobile app from 15 years ago. This visual style is a method that lazy devs often use when they have a lack of interest/capabilty to create highly detailed, high poly models and instead use shader effects to disguise that shortcoming under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the mobile app. It's far below the state of the art visuals gamers expect as a result of their decisions.

Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.

These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

The Last Campfire has the almost scam-like price of $15 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the mobile app, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

Unfortunately Steam reviewers aren't presented with a "Maybe" option... if they did, that's what I'd choose. This isn't a completely bad game, but it's also not one of the best. As always, if you read my review and you can overlook the negatives I've called out, or they just aren't important to you, then by all means go ahead and buy this. But personally, I don't think it's even remotely reasonable to ask PC gamers to spend FIFTEEN BUCKS on a mobile app.

You all have phones, don't you?