A Firelit Room is a graphical overhaul on A Dark Room, a game I've reviewed earlier, it improves a bit on the gameplay as well and makes it a bit more bearable. While it improves on some systems, I feel that it worsens the experience in other ways. I enjoyed the idle aspect a bit more, but world exploration and overall upgrades were even slower this time around; Worse, some of the new UI changes made the game even less playable.
Much like ADR, the game starts in a dark room where you make a fire, then collect wood to build things, attract people and collect things to rinse and repeat. The flow of resources is a bit more enjoyable so you don't feel like collecting wood is as much of a chore, but the limit on housing made it so I couldn't expand production, which didn't feel great. That being said, the new UI elements make many simple actions more difficult than they should. It's really easy to select something by mistake, you can't see how much of a resource you need to buy a thing without hitting a help button, and sliders to select how much of a thing you want are really imprecise; Choosing one item when you have only one requires you to slide the bar all the way, plus or minus buttons would've been much better.
The unlocking of gameplay mechanics feels like it comes slower than ADR; I've spent more time on the world map trying to figure out what my next move was and the battle system wasn't improved. I really wish that it had changed it to auto-fight. At least this time around I didn't encounter thieves and I almost had a good iron workflow before I stopped playing the game. The perks seemed similar and again, moving around the map felt weird and imprecise as the tiles you need to tap on are smaller than your fingers.
AFR isn't a terrible game, to repeat myself, but it didn't grab my attention past the bare minimum. The resource collection for wood was okay this time around, but everything else was slow as molasses, even switching workers around. After getting iron workers going, I decided that I was good.
