In April 2021, the favorite Ludum Dare game was held with the theme ‘Deeper and Deeper’. The participants had 48 hours to come up with a game together, and Sébastien Benard — known for his work on Dead Cells — decided to try to make a firefighting game called Nuclear Blaze. After the competition ended, Benard wanted to expand on the idea and give it a real release, which led to the Nuclear Blaze we have today. While it still feels a bit simplistic, this is a great take on the action platformer genre.
Nuclear Blaze puts you in the role of a firefighter deployed with your crew to put out a forest fire that has gotten out of control. After exposing the worst, you come across a secret research black spot in the woods that is also on fire and go inside to investigate before you’re trapped inside and cut off from communication with your team. With no other choice, you delve deeper into the facility to put out what fires you can and collect files that can tell you more about what happened to the many dead researchers there.
Nuclear Blaze isn’t exactly a story-focused game, but we still appreciated the atmosphere it evokes. The object you are exploring is heavily borrowed from the myths it is about a project of the SCP Foundation, a collaborative fiction chronicling the notes and Kafkaesque bureaucracy of a paranormal research organization. Many of the redacted files you collect provide fleeting glimpses of the strange things inside and while you don’t actually encounter too many creepy activities, there’s still a lot to love about the sense of quiet dread that grows as you venture further into the darkness alone, knowing full well that something out of control.
Gameplay takes place through a level-based 2D action structure where you open doors, use key cards to access new areas, rescue cats and extinguish many from fire. Your trusty hose and water tank are your best friends here, but the amount of water is limited and you can only fill it in a few places. Therefore, you must plan your progress through each level to a certain extent, because fires that are not completely extinguished will soon flare up again and undo all your hard work. And if you happen to touch any fire even once (at base difficulty), you will instantly die and be sent back to your last checkpoint.
To keep things fresh, you occasionally unlock new abilities or come across new level tricks that introduce some much-needed variety. Upgrades extend to relatively small things like a larger water tank or the ability to shoot water upwards, while level gimmicks introduce things like valves you have to locate and turn to activate sprinklers or enemies that will harass you while you try to put out the flames. Each level will only take you about five minutes to complete, maybe a little longer if you search for secrets and find that stage’s hidden cat.
This brings us to what might be Nuclear Blaze’s biggest flaw for some, which is its short length. Given its development origins, Nuclear Blaze was clearly never intended as a ‘full’ release, clocking in at around two and a half hours if you really taking your time with it. You can extend this a little further by replaying it in New Game+ called ‘Hold I Beer Mode’ which introduces you to new rooms and abilities with a much harder difficulty, but this is certainly not a game that will last you more than an afternoon or two. Short length is not necessarily a an issue—short games are more welcome today than ever—but they’re worth mentioning for those who were hoping for something longer. For better or for worse, Nuclear Blaze is just a sweet little game that gently explores a few ideas before wrapping it up.
Those who struggle with the fairly unrelenting base difficulty will be pleased to know that there are a number of accessibility options to ensure that everyone can play at their own skill level and still see everything without compromising the core gameplay. You can adjust things like how much (if any) damage you take or how long it takes you to run out of water, and there’s even a ‘Kids Mode’ that offers significantly easier levels with lots of trucks and helicopters.
Visually, Nuclear Blaze reminded us a bit of Atooi’s Xeodrifter with its simple retro art style and tiny main character. The spritework here is generally well done, if a bit quirky, and we appreciated the use of a surprisingly diverse color palette. You’d think the interior of a burned-out government research facility would be pretty drab and depressing, but we noticed plenty of instances where different shades of blue, green, and red were used to create some cool contrasts and make the levels more visually appealing.
All of this is matched by a soundtrack from Pentadrangle that borrows a bit from the Metroid playbook in presenting players with an atmospheric and slightly menacing collection of tunes to heighten the sense of isolation and curiosity. There’s even a few chiptunes, and while it doesn’t feature a very extensive selection of songs, the soundtrack feels like a good fit for the tone that Nuclear Blaze is clearly going for.
Conclusion
It might not last long, but Nuclear Blaze is a cool action platformer that explores well its core idea of prioritizing firefights over enemies. Things like Hold I Beer Mode and all the hidden cats help reduce replayability a bit, while strong level design and solid gameplay make the moment-to-moment action worthwhile. For $15, Nuclear Blaze looks like it only enough to justify the price of admission, especially if you’re a fan of 2D action games; we recommend you try it.
