Warning: This review contains spoilers.
Warning: This review contains brief mentions of rape, suicide and domestic violence.
Warning: This review is my opinion.




Her Dreams of Fire is a mind screw by Liberty created for a 10-day contest with the restriction of using only the 2k3 RTP. It's an artsy game with multiple endings, strange seemingly disconnected observations made by the heroine, and lots of bewildering content. Deliberately cryptic and designed to be open to interpretation, the story is confusing and labyrinthine. The game uses an array of quirky metrics to quantify your performance, utilizing private variables as conditionals to attain a set of possible endings. The title evokes correlations to Lynch's Fire Walk with Me, due to its surreal seemingly incoherent fragmented storyline and characters. Due to the variables being hidden that decide endings, it is not readily apparent which choices matter, but the fact is that all of them affect the ending except one. It is an experiment with variables and switches that is dictated by seemingly insignificant actions, from the number of times one examines a mirror to the number of times one attempts to jump off a building.


For an art game, the details are surprisingly solidified. Many art games create an illusory idea of a story and populate it with pretentious details. Her Dreams of Fire not so. Once finished, there is a clear idea of some events that have taken place, while still remaining vague and open to interpretation.

My grasp of any game's story is looser than most people. I tend to forget character's names, important plot points, location names, events, tutorial tips and other miscellaneous text. It is partially because I skim read, but it is also because I tend to exhibit poor data retention and memory. Mum will ask me to fetch something from downstairs, and halfway I may forget what I am doing and use the toilet instead. I'm absent-minded.

I am a big fan of non-linear storytelling, and I wish for it to be explored more in games. You interact with objects that provide cryptic explanations, existential statements and anachronisms about death. The first portion of the game concerns the urge for the player to commit suicide by jumping off a skyscraper. The second half of the game explores the protagonist's past, in particular her familial relations.

What I enjoyed in the first half was the quite deep philosophical implications, about how we leave nothing behind when we die, and we enter nothing, but it was more making the stance that we don't enter anything, not even nothing, we just become the void or something similar, and the things we leave behind with our loved ones (if we have any) are only memories, but even they don't matter: nothing matters. It was a statement of nihilism within the character's mind. So the house was kind of like a metaphor for the main character's mind during her contemplation to jump off the roof of a skyscraper building.

In some portions, I felt like the dark themes were not done justice by the very cute-looking lighthearted sprites. It felt tacky when the domestic violence scene was acted out using battle animations.

The sequence of events, if you take them literally, is actually quite a compelling story. I must confess I'm not that attentive towards very many small plot details in story-heavy games, so I tend to miss them a lot, but what I gathered was that there was an abusive father, who physically assaulted the girl's mother, and, in present day (which I assume is 10 or so years later) she has regressed to a suicidal state. I'm not sure whether she started seeing visions or not (she tells some kind of doctor - I'm not sure if it was a psychologist - that she sees things in the daytime) but she's being plagued by her past (or lack of past?) that was in fact quite traumatic. (I say "lack of past" because there is a choice where she has to either deny or accept if what happened really happened.)

I sensed possible implications of rape. When I interacted with the sheets on her bed, I interpreted that it indicated that there had been more liquid spilled on it than her tears. I thought that this implied sexual assault. Then it says her mother's tears were there too, so I assumed the mother knew about it as well, but was unable to speak up about it to the people around her. It is indicated that the aunt had asked the main character what was going on, but the protagonist was unable to tell because she was too afraid of what might happen. This was entirely realistic and the part that most hit home to me.

The protagonist examines a room later in time when she sees her family members as piles of bones, and the father says to her "I love you I HATE YOU I love you" or something similar, which indicates that her parents probably used language of love but the actions spoke hate, so that it was like an undertone of hate to coat over the love they professed out loud. I interpreted that the special reading materials in the barrel indicated pornographic materials (because he told the girl that she wasn't allowed to touch them), which in my opinion informed the highly sexualized motives of the father. I may be wrong about much of this, though.

So in the end, I figured that, in order to free herself, she had to forgive her mother, and realize that her mother was only acting cold to her and did nothing about her father's abuse because she herself was being abused and felt powerless to cry out for help. The psychiatrist is trying to help her recover from her trauma. I like that in the end, the game doesn't use the cliche that psychiatrists do nothing but sit people down in beds and ask them how they feel, but that the psychiatrist can actually help them through their situation. That's rare in media.

If Liberty had experiences that are similar to the main protagonist, or had someone in the family who was similar, I feel for that person. If they are still alive, I'm so grateful and I admire that. It's tough for someone to go through something traumatic but to turn it around is so very glad to see and it makes me want to commend them and express love and sympathy.




Examining the game, I believe the metrics may be imbalanced. The variables designed to calculate a correct ending as consequence to the player's actions pose a unique experiment, but to do so, establish invalid semantic links between the avatar's actions, and the player's mind. For example, you are given a choice. Each choice adds to a different variable. Even cancellation adds to a variable. The result of your choice is stored, but never communicated to you. This is not the problem. The problem is that the choice you make is not calculated in what in my mind is seemed to be logical, and some of the metrics used are haphazard, seemingly random, and spur from vague responses that players gave when they were minimally engaged. These insignificant actions are judged as extremely significant in the game's eyes, when in fact these are often the actions that are spurred on more by curiosity than anything else.

One of the gripes I have about this game is that if you attempt to jump off the building at least 10 times, you already cannot achieve the ending where the protagonist appears happiest, the desirable ending. The metrics are bizarre; some of them seem to hold no meaning or connection to the results they produce. The number of times one examines a mirror would never cross a player's mind to be counted, nor does it necessarily indicate any measure of the human psyche other than the fact that some may interact with mirrors more than others. I was not engaged because I could not perceive a correlation between the actions I did and the consequences to them. The game might understand why I achieved a certain ending, but I didn't. I believe that is fundamental to understanding and connecting with the story.

I was not engaged because I could not perceive a correlation between the actions I did and the consequence that followed. Little did I know, that if I had jumped off a building 3 less times before I had saved, I may have had a chance at obtaining the new ending. But what if I had continued to attempt to achieve the happy ending, forever loading from that save where the conditional requirement for failure was already exceeded, not knowing that my attempts to achieve a happy ending were impossible because of a small conditional branch that says I could not pass? That is a cruel fate which I would not wish for anyone. The fickle nature of acquisition of new endings will lead people to become disengaged as the game does the opposite of what it intends - make player choice less meaningful.

More important decisions should hold more weight. Currently, when playing, if you are on top of the building you naturally have the curiosity to see what happens when you walk to the edge. When I was propelled backwards, I did not register that as an attempt to jump. I registered it as the game disallowing me to jump, but I did not anticipate that this would be measured as a metric of my self-loathing. When jumping off the building once by experimenting, means as much as a potent revelatory choice about whether you admit your mother loves you or hates you, and whether you blame her for it, there is something wrong with the choice in priorities. The admission that your father is a "him" instead of a "dad" should, for example, weigh 3-5 times more than the other decisions.

Save points are not readily apparent. They are hidden in walls with no indication that they exist. I only discovered one in the final room, and I had thought that that was the only save point available. This led me to believe that the game consisted of a mere set of decisions from the last save point that would dictate an ending.


Despite some strong story points, this game was quite frustrating for me. I liked the atmosphere of some rooms, but some were just too confusing to even understand how things correlated. I understand that the intention was to provide a disparate set of clues that you can piece together in any which format you like, to come up with your own versions and interpretations, but I felt like the storytelling could have been handled a little more logically. Even Lynch is more straight than this, and it's compelling because he walks that fine tightrope between surrealistic and finding the weird in the mundane.

I was frustrated mostly because I couldn't understand the correlation between action and consequence. I wasn't sure which actions I did had which consequences, and thus I couldn't strategize. I know this seems like I'm judging a piece of art with a measuring rule, but pieces of art should connect with the subject emotionally and/or spiritually. Because of its lack of action-consequence correlation, for me, this one missed more than it hit. It was redeemable, and a good game could be made out of this if refined. But this particular one just didn't make sense to this one reviewer. I suppose the next guy may praise the game for being a great example of non-linear narrative and experimenting with new forms and mediums. That may be legitimate for him, too. But not everyone is the same, and not everything resonates with everyone. And that's OK, because that's just life and I'm only one person, and I'm OK with that.

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