Extract from the Archivist’s logbook regarding Fire Field for the period 13–17 May 2026.

Day 0 — Wednesday, May 13, 2026

The first contact came through the RPGjeuxvidéo inbox: an email from Naoki Fujinaga, a 45-year-old Japanese creator who told me he had built an old-school hack ‘n’ slash inspired by Diablo II and Ultima Online: Fire Field. He explained that he had no programming background to start with, and that he had built the entire game in 90 days with the help of AI:

My first thought was that this author — I won’t call him a developer, because to me he isn’t one — was either bold, or insane. The current climate is not a friendly one for AI-made games. A great many developers, journalists, and professionals from every walk of life have launched themselves into a crusade against these AIs, which they see as a threat to humanity. Suffice it to say, he was diving into a risky experiment. Imagine: zero background in software, and yet he had built a game in three months. Three months! A quarter of a year! 90 days! And translated into 95 languages, no less! Since I like to consider myself « open-minded, » I felt I owed it to him to dig deeper — to find out whether this was a joke, or a genuine project with a real chance of producing something viable. Which would mean that the future of video games might be passing through the hands of these new troublemakers, these AI manipulators. A vision of the future, in a way… So I asked him for a key, and dove in.

Day 1 — Thursday, May 14, 2026

The next day I receive the key that lets me install this curiosity, so I can put my first impressions in front of you. I wasn’t expecting much. Among all the AI-generated games I had seen tested online, most were pale, ridiculous knock-offs of titles made by real developers — nothing with an identity of its own. This was going to be the perfect opportunity to confirm my negative opinion of generative AI.

And right from the start, Fire Field plays right into that expectation. The very first musical note, the very first images, and we’re face to face with a Diablo clone. So we’re on familiar ground — at least for those who know the 1997 original. You can see it immediately in the title screen: the font is the one so familiar to the Diablo brand.

The intro is delivered by a female voice in French — slightly nasal, not quite natural, and not entirely matching the on-screen text. We’ll have this same problem with every French voice for the game’s NPCs. The game is fully dubbed, but English words are pronounced with that ridiculous French accent. That said, you sometimes find the same flaw in plenty of indie games, so it’s nothing to lose sleep over.

The pitch is odd: it gives 1997 as the starting point, when Fire Field is otherwise a dark fantasy. I don’t fully follow. The musical atmosphere is heavy, often built around solo instruments: a piano, an acoustic guitar, a saxophone. It aims for austere, anxious, sad — and it pulls it off pretty well. If I hadn’t known that a large part of it was AI-made, I wouldn’t have guessed.

During this early access, you only have access to one of the three planned classes. The ranger and the sorcerer will arrive soon. The four character stats are identical to Diablo’s, even if the terms aren’t the same. Everything reeks of Diablo — you could almost wonder whether this isn’t plagiarism of a game from 1997… Funny, that pitch date.

So I launch a game, and — bam! First major problem: movement is on WASD, and on our European keyboards (QZSD), it’s impossible to play properly. And of course, the movement keys can’t be reconfigured! On top of that, you can’t click to move with the mouse. I warned you: this is old-school.

And on top of that, a second blow: a flickering, blurry visual filter that’s painful to the eye. I have no idea why the author signed off on this kind of rendering quality. On top of that, you have to crank brightness to 100% to see anything in the omnipresent gloom. So I do my best to wander the village. The scale is way off: characters too big for environments that are far too small. And bam! — a third one for the road: it’s slow. So slow! With a field of view around my character that’s just ridiculous. And my character’s movement, with animations that aren’t exactly riveting, isn’t synced with footstep sounds either. Yes, this opening cements my view of AI: good for copying, like a beginner apprentice fumbling through the trade. It makes me want to uninstall the whole thing. That’s the moment I left a comment on the news post about the game on our site, telling you under no circumstances to buy it. The Steam page had plenty of positive reviews, but it was obvious they were either fake, or simply from friends who had never tested an action-RPG in their lives, let alone a Diablo! The interface is identical to its predecessor’s, with the red life orb on the left and the blue mana orb on the right. The interface — « inventory, » « quest, » « status » — is in English, as you can see. So there are still translation issues, and some Japanese text mixed in too. The inventory has item names in English while the descriptions are in French. And among the lingering problems, French menu text overflows its boxes. To its credit, there’s an options list at the top of the screen — which you can hide. A nice touch, so you don’t forget the controls. At the start of the adventure, you’re in a village, and you go talk to the Elder. He sends you to fetch the blacksmith, who has gone to recover a treasure on the second basement floor of the cemetery (?). If you save him, the village will warm up to you. But there’s a consistency issue: if nobody wants to go looking for him, how do the NPCs know where the blacksmith actually is? And as for the « cemetery, » you actually have to head to the church to find the blacksmith.

Second thing that bothers me: everyone calls me « citizen of Rainz » even though they don’t know me, and even though the Elder said they shouldn’t even pay attention to me. Wandering around this hamlet, I cross a guard being attacked by three skeletons. I click on the enemies to lend the man a hand, and they die. He leads me a bit further down into the village, to what he says is his home, and offers me his chest for my personal use. Except the chest right next to me is unreachable. Bug? After a few moments, by repositioning myself, I manage to open it. This isn’t off to a great start! Well, I venture a few seconds into the dungeon, but with those cursed keys, I can’t really play. And even though I can change the key layout via Windows, the change doesn’t take effect inside the game. The animations are stiff and I feel like I’ve gone back to the 90s. My character creeps through the dungeon at a crawl, and the visibility range is short. I see my hit points going down, but I don’t see anyone, which is a bit unsettling. Moving about with difficulty — remember I couldn’t reconfigure the keys — I reach a skeleton archer who eventually kills me, even though I take out two rats along the way. The potions I had in my belt only restore a third of my HP, and I’ve used them all. But I die anyway. I’m told I can be resurrected by the healer or by the floor’s Tree of Life. I head back to the healer near the church entrance — just to stop playing. At this point, I start writing a preview tearing the author to shreds over this lousy joke. Really, 13 euros for this! An outrage! Robbery! A scam! Except — I think twice. Instead of finalizing my preview for you, dear readers, I copy-paste everything I’ve written above and I send it to the author. The idea is to put the author in front of his own design failures, and in a way to challenge him: let’s see what he can pull off to right the ship, if he isn’t really a developer.

Day 2 — Friday, May 15, 2026

The very next day, Naoki — as respectful as ever — is happy that I flagged the problems. And on top of that, get this: he fixed everything in 12 hours!

I relaunch the game, which runs a short update, and I have to admit: every problem I encountered is gone. Out go the flickers in the village (though they linger in the dungeon). Out goes the key configuration issue — it now works for AZERTY keyboards. Out goes the molasses pace and the squinty field of view. Brightness is up. I can finally start playing seriously! It’s time to visit this dungeon. Left-click swings once, so there’s no point in holding the button down. Right-click casts a single spell chosen from your spellbook, which costs mana and has a cooldown. For the warrior, that’s the heal spell.

And the game has its own touches of originality: the weapon you hold has a specific ability that runs on a cooldown. Your character is visually dressed in real time with whatever you equip, even if it’s not yet identified. Events crop up as you explore: beyond the acid pools sprinkled around, there are spikes that pop up out of plates and chip away at your HP, and in certain rooms you can find yourself locked in, forced to take down a horde of enemies that spawn for a limited time. Sure, the scale in the dungeons isn’t respected either, which isn’t really a bother, but all of this can still be polished. In any case, there are plenty of barrels and crates that hold a lot of loot. That part is satisfying. Every time you level up, your character gets 5 points to distribute across 4 stats. But there’s no pop-up explaining what they actually do. Through the fights, I run out of healing potions, so I head back to the surface, leaving a lot of items on the ground, since my inventory isn’t very big. You know: Diablo! After restocking at the healer, I head back into the underground to continue the adventure. But while the level hasn’t changed, the previous loot is gone, and brand-new enemies are waiting for me. I’m not making much progress, and remember, I need to get down to the second floor to find the blacksmith. The fights feel « heavy » — you have to click on the enemy to deal a hit, and it stays imprecise, especially with the ambient blur. On top of that, for loot on the ground — gear or coins — you have to click on it to pick it up. There’s a big boss per floor, and what was bound to happen happens: dying leaves your gear on the spot, and in ghost form you have to find your way back to the floor’s Tree of Life to be resurrected. But you come back stripped down to a basic dagger. Naked as the day I was born, I go back to fetch my gear — and of course, the enemies are waiting right where I died. And… I die again. Worse: even when I picked up one of my pieces of gear off the ground, my character didn’t auto-equip it, and I had to dig into the inventory to put it on. As you can imagine, doing that mid-combat is a death sentence. So here I am, ghost again, with no way through. I go back to the Tree of Life, but when it heals me, I have my knife and my, um, dignity, and I have to go fetch my gear again. And… I die. Again. See the problem? The gameplay loop is reduced to that. But I have an idea. As a ghost, I decide to go explore the underground, since enemies ignore me in this form. I make it down to the second floor, and now all I have to do is push forward with my adventure. At the entrance to floor 2, there’s a Tree of Life. Naked, but alive. It would have been more logical, upon dying, to be resurrected outside the dungeon — near the healer or a teleporter — so as not to break the gameplay loop, even if this freedom does open up alternate play styles. In practice, you just need to die, scout the floor as a ghost, find the stairs down to the next floor, then come back to resurrect, and barrel toward your goal. So I write back to the author to explain the difficulty and how painful the gameplay loop becomes with all the problems I’ve listed above. And you know what?

Day 3 — Saturday, May 16, 2026

The next day — surprise! The author contacts me to say he has fixed every problem I reported, and that I can keep playing! So he is capable, using his code and AI, of patching his game with a speed that genuinely impresses me. He has perfect command of the AI he is using. I head back into the dungeon. He has removed all the filters, and it’s now far easier on the eye. Stripped of frills, what I find is a look that reminds me of Exiled Kingdoms. And indeed, after asking, the author tells me he used the same assets (FLARE), which explains the resemblance. I press on with my adventure, and I still run into difficulties and bugs, but nothing insurmountable — exactly the kind of issues you’d find in any early access. Each floor I descend brings new bosses, who to my taste lack charisma and look a bit fuzzy, but who drop, upon death, a unique weapon with its own ability. The gameplay loop becomes pleasant with all these changes, and most of all I start enjoying myself — quite simply because the addiction is there: I want to go further. Of course, it isn’t perfect, but Fire Field fulfills its role as an old-school hack ‘n’ slash. Of course, if you don’t carry any nostalgic baggage, the game will probably just feel dull and dated.

I reach floor 4 and I do something the game didn’t anticipate: instead of reading the book that unlocks the fifth and final floor, I head back to the surface to sell it and repair my gear, which wears down. And of course, when I teleport back to floor 4, I can’t access floor 5. No problem, I head back up to buy the book from the blacksmith — except it no longer appears on his counter. A lovely bug that prevents me from finishing this early access. Same goes for the healing potion restock issue at the healer’s: you have to relaunch the game for her to have potions in stock again. And I flag the problem to the author again. This time, I’m dealing with a real bug, and I wonder whether he’ll manage to fix my book and restock issues. And you know what?

Day 4 — Sunday, May 17, 2026

Yes! You know how this ends. Naoki gets in touch and shows me how to resolve the problem by typing lines of code in the game’s console. That’s the moment I stop seeing him as merely an author and start seeing him as a real developer, because he works on the code. He has fixed every bug and problem I ran into — issues that made his game far too rickety. The title seems to be gaining in maturity and becoming genuinely more interesting. And all of this in 4 days! It isn’t perfect. It remains an old-school title that younger players are going to hate, because many can’t bear frustration. But when you know the original game, the 6 hours this early access offers turn out to be far more pleasant by the time I’m writing this. Yes, I made it to the end of this experience, and the fact that this production carries the « AI » stamp doesn’t make it any worse than a game built by humans, nor more buggy. The author simply needed help at the start of this early access — a small push to see things more clearly and to receive concrete player feedback. From there, he was able to steer his development with much greater ease. It took me 6 hours to make the tour of this early access, which only offers one class. With AI, I thought I’d be facing a botched clone, and in the end I was wrong. I’m glad I kept an open mind and had this experience. Naoki has a strong mastery of the AI he uses, like an architect, and I am pleasantly surprised (and at the same time worried for human developers’ future) — because he has managed to create his own game inspired by Diablo, even though without AI, his project would never have seen the light of day. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so.

In conclusion, AI can be brilliant for video game creation, if it’s used by developers who have the skills to supplement it, after the basic foundation has been laid. And it seems that is the case for this creator, who, without it, would never have been able to realize this project.

In 4 days, his game has matured, and even if it isn’t exactly original, it’s evolving rather positively. In any case, I can tell you it has earned my respect. Fire Field may not have the stuff of a great game — that isn’t its ambition — and it doesn’t deserve to cost more than 10 euros, but for the moment, it has that little something that can charm you, especially if you’re a player nostalgic for Diablo, a title from almost 30 years ago!