The visuals and audio were done really well to sell a super eerie ambience. Seeing those 2d figures in the forest watching me as the fire got weaker, and as they put out my torch was pretty terrifying. And having to venture out further and further to get more wood was quite tense. Reminds me a bit of Don't Starve. Also very creative to have an almost solemn narrative fail state instead of the fnaf style jumpscare i was expecting.
However, I didn't understand why it kept saying "light torch - 0/5" when i went to the fire, since I couldn't increase the number from zero even though the torch was lit. Also I'd have liked it if the game told me the current state of the fire maybe? And then sadly it crashed early on and messed up everything on my pc when it did so i had to restart it. I didn't really feel the drive to return to it after that but I think atmospherically and creativily, you cooked.
Viewing post in The Ashes I Carry jam comments
I think we didn't convey the other main goal of the game clearly enough, sadly. There are 5 memories scattered in the forest, each of which has a path leading to it from the campfire. By collecting them and throwing them into the fire, you would increase the counter and get the second ending. That combined with the campfire burning down a bit too quickly has led to seemingly no one getting past simple wood collecting in the game.
Another problem is that the fire actually has a very high limit, but there is no indicator of that, so it's hard to understand the stage it is in at the moment, like you said. We just really didn't want to clutter the game with GUI as to not ruin the atmosphere. And sorry about the crash! We hope to fix the performance issues when we finish the web build.