Coming Soon: Play with Fire

Manifesto's First Exclusive Game

Designed by Chris Bateman (who produced Kult: Heretic Kingdoms), Play with Fire is a highly unusual platform puzzle game in which you play a giant ball of fire--and burn things down.

Bateman (who blogs here) 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.

Play With Fire was developed in an unusual way; Bateman's company, International Hobo is based in the UK, but owns a development studio, Fantasy Labs Entertainment in India. Many of the game's more than 100 levels were created by people who responded when Bateman asked for submissions on his blog. So the development of Play With Fire was distributed not only across the Internet, but also across the globe.

Look for it here, early in the New Year!

In the meantime, screenshots can be viewed here.