$9.99Firework
A funeral fire reopens a massacre case in a remote Chinese mountain village, and rookie cop Lin Lixun is pulled into the investigation. A horror puzzle game with no jump scares and barely a ghost in sight, where the dread comes from what people do to each other. Short, hand-drawn and quietly devastating.
Is Firework worth it?
Firework is worth it if…
- you want a horror game that frightens with atmosphere and implication, not jump scares
- you like mysteries where the story, not the difficulty, is the reason to keep going
- you are in the mood for something short, emotional and quietly devastating
- you enjoy stories rooted in a specific place and time, with all their detail and weight
Screenshots
A mystery that unfolds like a story
You read your way through this one: it is a story-driven game where dialogue, narration and illustrated scenes carry you from start to end. The setup is simple. A fire breaks out at a funeral, the police reopen a massacre case everyone thought was closed, and Lin Lixun joins the re-investigation by chance. As you dig deeper, the victims' pasts surface piece by piece, and the case only grows stranger. Was it a supernatural event, or a carefully planned murder? The narrative stacks its suspense in layers: you think you have the truth, then the mist closes over everything again. Every character matters, and the game wants you to understand them, to share their joys and sorrows before you learn what happened to them.
Horror without the jump scares
Firework pursues a veiled kind of oriental horror. There are no jump scares, nowhere to hide and almost no ghosts on screen, yet the dread is constant. The game builds it from atmosphere instead: a bleak, strange village, unsettling sound, and the slow realization that something is deeply wrong here. Nothing chases you and nothing can hurt you; the chill comes from what the story implies. If you want horror that gets under your skin through suggestion rather than shocks, this is built for exactly that.
Puzzles woven into the plot
The puzzles sit in a deliberate sweet spot: not hard enough to stall you, but with real cleverness to them. More importantly, they are tied to the story, so solving one moves the mystery forward rather than interrupting it. You investigate as Lin Lixun, who can speak with the dead, moving between the surface of the village and what lies beneath it. One moment has you examining photographs where the world shifts between what the camera shows and what is really there. The answers are rarely obscure, but the way a puzzle reveals a piece of someone's past gives each one weight. It is detective work where the deduction and the drama are the same act.
A village drawn in watercolor and memory
The art is nostalgic watercolor, hand-drawn and a little retro, which suits the setting: a Chinese mountain town around the early 2000s. The game scatters period Easter eggs through it, objects from a specific era that carry real weight for anyone who grew up then, from photo booth machines to landline phones. That lived-in detail does double duty. It makes the village feel like somewhere real, and it makes the darkness around it feel closer. The bleak and strange atmosphere is the point of the whole place: you linger in it, take in the emptiness, and feel how cut off these people are from the world outside the mountains.
What should you know before playing?
How long does Firework take to finish?
It is a short game: most people finish it in around three to four hours, often in a single evening. The story is compact and tightly paced, with little filler between its chapters, so it suits a one-sitting playthrough. The trade-off is that it is over quickly, which some find abrupt after how invested they have become.
Is it too scary to play alone at night?
It depends on what scares you. There are no monsters chasing you, no fail states and almost nothing lunges at the screen, but the atmosphere is genuinely unsettling, and a few sudden images and sounds can still make you flinch with the lights off. If you are sensitive to dread and implication, it lands harder than its lack of jump scares suggests.
Can you play it solo?
Yes, it is a singleplayer game from start to finish, and it plays well alone: reading the dialogue and piecing the case together at your own pace is the core of it. It also works as a game to experience with someone beside you, since the puzzles are gentle enough to talk through together and the story gives you plenty to discuss afterwards.
