Wildfire

Stealth games have a control problem. Most of them hand you a toolkit of guaranteed outcomes — a silent takedown here, a distraction arrow there — and call the resulting checklist “player choice.” Wildfire, from Australian micro-studio Sneaky Bastards, does something braver. It hands you fire, and fire doesn’t care whose side you’re on.

The premise is folk-horror efficient: you’re a villager who survives a meteor strike, absorbs elemental power, and is promptly branded a witch by the forces of the Arch Duchess. Now soldiers are burning your village and marching your neighbors off in chains, and you — fragile, unarmed, one hit from death — have to slip through forests, caverns, and frozen mountaintops to get them back. You can’t fight. You can only manipulate: ignite grass and watch flames crawl across the level with genuine physical logic, freeze rivers into walkways, and eventually heave earth itself into cover and climbing routes.

Sneaky Bastards is a name worth pausing on. The studio grew out of a publication devoted entirely to stealth game design analysis, and Wildfire reads like a design thesis made playable — a team that spent years critiquing the genre finally showing its work. Released on PC in May 2020, with a Switch version following, it earned a Metacritic score of 79 and critical comparisons that flatter it: praise positioning it as one of the most mechanically imaginative 2D platformers since Hollow Knight. That’s aggressive praise. It’s also not far off.

• Dynamic fire propagation: Flames spread realistically through grass, foliage, and structures, consuming levels in real time. Fire threatens you exactly as much as it threatens your pursuers — the game’s central tension.
• Three-element toolkit: Fire for chaos and fear, water/ice for traversal and traps, earth for cover and vertical routes. Abilities expand as your bond with each element deepens, restructuring how old level types read.
• Coordinated enemy AI: Guards communicate, flank, and hunt in groups, forcing you to weaponize fear and terrain rather than out-fight them.
• Systemic sandbox levels: Dense, layered stages built for experimentation, with rescue objectives, challenge goals, and genuine replay value.
• Local two-player co-op: The full campaign supports a second villager, letting players chain elemental combos — one freezes the river, the other torches the shoreline.

The Loop: Arson as Grammar

Wildfire’s core loop is easy to grasp: infiltrate, free captive villagers, escort or spirit them out, escape. What makes it work is that every verb routes through a simulation rather than a script. Throw a fireball into dry grass and you haven’t triggered an event — you’ve started a process. The flames spread along the terrain, leap to adjacent brush, panic nearby guards, and, if the wind of your own bad judgment blows wrong, cut off your only exit. The game’s best moments are the ones it never authored.

This is the crucial distinction between Wildfire and the stealth-lite platformers it superficially resembles (Mark of the Ninja being the obvious touchstone). Klei’s masterpiece is a precision instrument — every tool does exactly what it promises. Wildfire is a chemistry set. Fear, not damage, is your primary weapon: guards who watch their patrol route become a firebreak will scatter, and a scattered guard is a bypassed guard. But fear cuts both ways. Panicked soldiers are unpredictable soldiers, and an elegant infiltration can collapse because a fleeing spearman blunders into a hiding spot.

Escalation Done Right

The progression structure deserves specific credit. New abilities — larger fire bursts, water manipulation, and the late-game earth powers that let you raise your own cover and climbing paths — don’t just add options. They recontextualize the level design. A river that was an obstacle early on is a highway later and a trap for pursuers after that. Levels are dense enough, and objectives layered enough (rescues, collectibles, challenge conditions), that replaying early stages with a full kit feels like returning to a childhood home with a lockpick set.

The enemy AI holds up its end. Guards coordinate searches, call out sightings, and squeeze you with genuine intent. This matters because Wildfire’s stealth is soft stealth — there’s no shadow-binary, no cone-of-vision abstraction to memorize. You’re reading grass height, terrain, and fire lines. When it works, it produces the improvisational scramble that big-budget immersive sims spend tens of millions chasing.

Where It Burns You

Now the criticism, because Wildfire earns a firm one: the game’s commitment to fragility produces real trial-and-error friction. You die in one hit. Simulations are, by definition, unpredictable. Combine those and the design will occasionally cost a ten-minute run to a flame gust or an AI improvisation that couldn’t reasonably have been anticipated. Checkpointing is decent but not generous, and the difference between “emergent masterpiece” and “cheap death” is sometimes just which side of the checkpoint it happened on. Players allergic to repetition should know this going in.

The escort element of villager rescues also inherits the genre’s oldest curse: your rescuees are less clever than your enemies, and shepherding them through a level already set half-ablaze can tip from tense into tedious.

Co-op, meanwhile, is a genuine differentiator — local two-player through the full campaign, with element combos that solo play can’t replicate. It’s chaotic in the way couch games should be. The absence of online co-op stings in a post-2020 world, but for a team this size it’s an understandable cut, not a lazy one.

Let’s be honest: Wildfire’s pixel art is functional, not gorgeous. Character sprites are small and simple, and screenshots undersell it badly — this game markets itself in motion or not at all. What the aesthetic does deliver is readability, which for a simulation game is the only visual metric that actually matters. Flammable grass, water, elevation, guard states: all legible at a glance, even mid-panic. And when a hillside genuinely catches — flame fronts advancing, smoke rolling, guards silhouetted against the orange — the modest art direction earns moments of real drama.

A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the fire simulation is the kind of workload modest systems should handle comfortably. The interface is unobtrusive, though ability-switching under pressure takes acclimation.

Steam is the definitive version: precise aiming for fireball trajectories, whether you prefer controller or mouse-assisted throws. If you have both platforms and no couch co-op partner attached to the Switch, buy it here.

Nintendo Switch is a natural conceptual fit — a systemic stealth game in bite-sized levels is exactly what handheld play wants, and detached Joy-Con co-op is the cheapest possible on-ramp for the two-player mode. But buyers should know one flag from the record: the Switch release is listed as unsupported on Nintendo Switch 2 due to game-progression problems. On original Switch hardware you’re fine; on Nintendo’s current console, that’s a real asterisk, and it’s disappointing to see it unresolved.

Wildfire is what happens when critics stop writing and start shipping. Sneaky Bastards spent years dissecting why stealth games work, then built one around the genre’s most neglected truth: tension comes from systems you influence, not tools you control. The result is rough in spots — the art is humble, the deaths occasionally cheap, the Switch 2 situation an unforced error — and the execution doesn’t always match the ambition. Six years on from release, almost nobody has followed its lead, which says less about Wildfire’s flaws and more about how hard this kind of design actually is. At fifteen dollars, we recommend it to the right audience: a solid, quietly inventive game that deserves more imitators than it has.