There are a lot of games that tussle with player agency, posing tough moral decisions that dignify your character’s journey. In the opening scene of the new Nintendo Switch and PC game Smoke and Sacrifice, the main character Sachi is tasked by her village elders to sacrifice her firstborn child to perpetuate her community’s continued safety. No one really explains why this is true, but as you take control of the mother and fetch your swaddled newborn child, there is no other option offered than to heed their demands. You can exhaustively speak to every NPC or look for a different route, but eventually the realization dawns that you are meant to sacrifice a helpless infant in the first three minutes of the game.

Here’s the next surprise: Smoke and Sacrifice, developed by Solar Sail Games, is a survival and crafting sim. It’s published on the Nintendo Switch and PC by Curve Digital, who previously investigated certain aspects of this genre before in 2017’s The Flame in the Flood: Complete Edition. While the latter title had a focus on emergent gameplay and roguelite aspects affected by permadeath, Smoke and Sacrifice is more concentrated on mind-numbing tasks and the endless accumulation of inventory trash, squeezing every possible minute of your attention on numerous middling quests and recipe crafting.

Even more surprising is that there’s an above-average story lying right underneath the repetitive gameplay loop. Following that extremely frustrating and macabre introduction, the narrative jumps seven years. After a monster attack (by “pugbears,” which are not as cute as their name implies) throws the town into pandemonium, Sachi sneaks off to the temple where the ritual was performed and manages to teleport herself into another world, damaged and infested by a deadly fog. Learning that her child may yet be alive, she sets off to find him.


It’s a setup which would best fit an action-adventure game, something closer to The Legend of Zelda, but Smoke and Sacrifice chooses to heavily channel Klei Entertainment’s Don’t Starve, instead. Sachi soon runs into dozens of creepy gasmask-wearing NPCs who offer their help in exchange for endless item-gathering. Initially, the game threatens to grow more interesting with a cascading quest log, but you soon realize that progress is oppressively designed to only reveal the smallest portions of the map, and you rarely ever manage more than one or two concurrent quests at a time.

The first handful of hours treat you to a winter biome and a swamp biome...several times over. Rather than offer a map with discreetly designed zones, Smoke and Sacrifice keeps throwing you into duplicate areas before it even hints at the remainder of its art assets. The swamps continuously return, leaving the designers out of new title-cards to use. Sickening Swamp? Deadly Swamp? Considering that many gamers consider swamp levels to be some of the most irritating areas in any game, it’s hard to imagine why the developers decided to put their worst feet forward in this way.


While, mechanically, the game feels like Don’t Starve, with its two dimensional characters, day-night cycle, hostile environment, and staged resource-gathering, the game lacks any tower defense or permadeath mechanics. When killed, Sachi returns to her last save point, with 1-2 sprinkled throughout any named area. She has a sizable inventory which will still fill up faster than you think, and can store items in countless immobile chests scattered throughout the game — good luck remembering where your most precious trinkets are, though. Was it the chest in the swamp next to the cooking pot? Or the other chest in the other swamp next to the other cooking pot?

Here’s an example of how preposterous the quest systems and gating becomes, even early on: a considerable way into the game’s first dozen areas, you are told that an important NPC exists in a part of the map that is protected by an impassable electrified floor. You’ve been obtaining recipes for rubber armor prior to this, which sensibly seem like they’ll assist in your progress there, but you haven’t been able to crafty any of them. Another NPC explains that the only way to obtain that rubber is by cutting a seemingly invicible and dangerous swamp plant. These NPCs, who you’ve been gamely helping thus far, refuse to help you farm this plant unless you fetch milk for them. That milk is only obtainable by a boss mob who shows up once a night and, to get it, you need to use another recipe to craft...a “milker.” Then, you’ll need to somehow bait the dangerous beast to run into a tree to become dazed, at which point you can briefly use the device on them.

The game lets you “favorite” useful items in your inventory for quick access, and there’s arguably never been a more ridiculous moment on the Nintendo Switch than having to favorite your “milker,” right next to your most-used weapons.


There is, possibly, the right type of gamer for the experience Smoke and Sacrifice provides, but the sweet spot in the Venn Diagram that blends “appreciates a dark, surreal story involving child sacrifice” with “enjoys progress impeded by having to milk a rare boss mob” seems woefully thin. It’s somewhat disappointing that such a uniquely grim world is built into a game of tiresome busywork.

While there are some fighting mechanics, they are overly-simplified, with weapons each offering only a single combo. Even further on into the game and once you've crafted enough equipment, enemy health bars are bloated, making battles with scrub-level mobs more time-consuming than you would expect. It’s almost as if there’s a hidden pay-to-win mechanic which was waiting to be implemented in the game.

The aforementioned tone in Smoke and Sacrifice is less playfully creative than Tim Burton in his prime, less dark or serious than Bloodborne. Its darkness is muddled, but presented in an intriguing way with steampunk character designs and artwork, which appear to be fully hand-drawn in a style that pays homage to George Kamitani’s classic Vanillaware games like Odin Sphere and Muramasa. The soundtrack is thoroughly forgettable, primarily noticed when you switch biomes, only in that the shift to another forgettable piece of music reminds you that there was music.


If the game was on mobile phones as a freemium title, it might retain sparse casual attention from a player waiting on line for a cappuccino. But as a premium-priced Nintendo Switch eShop game at $24.99, Smoke and Sacrifice is too tiresome to recommend, and its main hook is its unusual narrative — the problem is, in order to get through that narrative, you’ll have to milk a lot of hogs.