this is, without question, one of the most evil platformers of all time. truly. even considering how fire rock was made in the burgeoning era of evil platformers, its uniquely difficult gameplay remains as insurmountable now as it was then.

what makes it so challenging? everything, i'd say. but it's also everything that makes it interesting, because despite how aggravating progression is, fire rock actually has some cool ideas for the time. your character moves with a fluidity that is hard to get a grip on, made even more hard by the fact that you need to climb walls & jump into floating doors to proceed, while avoiding sprawling, quick moving mobs of enemies that you can only defeat using power-ups. as well, the health system is ... baffling, what with your health indicator being a frantically beating heart, which slows to a disturbing hault as you take hits, and peels away from the minimal UI to chase after & award you a shield if you manage to find a healing item.

fortunately, though, fire rock makes its mechanics simple -- everything is introduced in the first few levels, which means that, as a player, the only thing you need to worry about is parsing the stages & executing well enough to win. and for a game as suffocating as this one can feel, it's nice that, once you figure out what's going on, you can just play. some games benefit from excess mechanics & theatrics; evil platformers do not.

this is kind of a difficult one for me to give a star-rating, though. because, while i don't really like platformers, especially evil ones, i can't help but nod & smile at the unique edge this one has. so i think i will settle on neutrality for it. well done fire rock!