Ever since its original release, which was Chinese-only, Firework has received a lot of praise. And with the official English translation finally out, I was interested to see what’s all the buzz about. And, well, it’s a good game. Not anything special, but good.
Firework is a story-driven horror adventure game about an investigation of a tragedy in a Chinese remote mountain village. After a coffin suddenly catches fire during the funeral, a rookie policeman starts finding connections with an earlier case that concerned a death of an entire family and gets pulled deeper into the investigation. Since the town is highly superstitious, the main character must try to separate truth from fiction and discover if anything that happened was really supernatural. It’s a neat premise and for the most part it works quite well, while also providing some spooky visuals and atmosphere.
Of course, it’s very hard to avoid comparisons with games like Detention and Devotion and these comparisons won’t be in Firework favor. It’s not that this game is entirely linear and the investigation aspect of it is in the story only. Even though while there are occasional puzzles for you to do, you’re not really solving the case – the explanations are delivered for you in dialogues and beautiful scenes after you’ve done something only superficially related. Rather, it’s because while interesting, the game doesn’t leave any lasting impressions. Maybe it’s way too tied into the culture to be as impactful if you’re not part of it. Maybe the translation isn’t as good as it could be – even I could tell that it was quite dry.
Ultimately, Firework is more of a “neat” game, than a really cool memorable game. I liked it. It had some cool ideas, nice visuals and good music. But it’s not something that will stick with me.