We're checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.
Did you know that, in China, November is the real spooky season? You probably didn't, since I just made that up, but boy it'd be a convenient segue to talk about Firework, a creepy horror game from Chinese Shiying Studio, and one of the hidden gems squirrelled away in the depths of Game Pass.
There's been a fire at a funeral in a remote mountain village somewhere in the Chinese hinterland, and you, rookie cop Li Lixun, are the man to crack the case. That's not because of any Sherlock Holmes-like gift for cop-ery, mind you, but rather because officer Li was born on the right date and at the right time to become a sort of walking thin place—those spots in the world where the fabric between the physical and spiritual worlds gets frayed, letting all sorts of spooks and spectres seep in.
In other words, officer Li sees dead people, and that'll be handy for solving a case that revolves around a whole bunch of suspicious deaths that have racked the town's recent history. The funeral that caught fire? The guy in the coffin was a local shopkeeper named Wang Jincai, and there sure are rumours floating around that his untimely death had something to do with him badmouthing one of the victims of another, slightly less recent massacre. Perhaps her vengeful spirit offence?
Police story
By which I mean: of course her vengeful spirit took offence—you can tell because this is a horror game and also because, in your own wandering around the town, you keep being haunted by PT-like repetition, blood seeping from walls, and the constant presence of different forms of money and debt. Ghosts only do that kind of thing when they're distressed.
The actual gameplay behind that wandering is simple enough. Firework is a 2D, side-scrolling affair, but it makes good use of limited resources, alternating between plot-heavy, almost visual-novel-esque story sequences and puzzles that would be right at home in the olden (read: better, if you ask me) days of Resident Evil. Combine this item with that problem, figure out a phone number by checking clues in the environment, divine the correct frequency for a radio by observing the relative heights of four candles. You know, police work. At a certain point you even begin adding people to your party, giving you fresh eyes on old clues that open up solutions to new puzzles.
Those range from simple and speedy to proper brainteasers, but frankly, it's the vibe of the whole thing that makes Firework feel compelling to me. It's genuinely creepy, drawing on Chinese mythology to spin up a haunting that feels actually new to my horror-movie-addled brain. One sequence in particular—where poor Li has to hack through an ever-growing mass of thick, black hair to get to a corpse and a key—will stay with me for a while.
But at the root, Firework's themes are universal: the corrupting influence of money, hollowness and dehumanisation, and the debts we owe to each other and the dead
But at the root, Firework's themes are universal: the corrupting influence of money, hollowness and dehumanisation, and the debts we owe to each other and the dead. It's about what happens when the creditors come to collect, whether they're supernatural or, uh, natural, and the way that a certain kind of middle-class aspiration can fray the ties that bind even a small, close-knit community. The whole thing feels like a subtle exploration of the negative side-effects that accompany an increase in affluence.
Just, you know, with ghosts. And paper dolls that bleed from the eyes. The whole thing really is very spooky, and it's all the more impressive for how far it stretches itself despite its modest means.
Which, as a bonus, isn't too far. Firework clocks in at a brisk and reasonable 3-4 hours—a bitesize horror snack compared to the other 100+ (1000+?) hour behemoths you can dedicate entire percentage points of your life to these days. It's a game that knows what it wants to accomplish and does it without overstaying its welcome, which feels increasingly rare in our bloated modern era.
So if you're on the hunt for something new to check out and you want to try something on the niche side, boot up Firework on Game Pass, Steam, GOG, and/or Epic with my recommendation. Halloween might be over, but true spook-heads know that real scares aren't constrained by the calendar. They can pop up anywhere, and especially in remote mountain villages that have played host to like a dozen suspicious deaths.
