When it feels like the world is going to shite, sometimes good old escapism can guide you toward a more welcoming state of mind. Enter the cute indie game Fireside Feelings.
It’s by French indie devs Team Empreintes in Angouleme, France, and launched in June 2025. Essentially, it’s a mental wellness game where you have conversations to promote empathy, connection, and positivity. We dig a bit of that.
Express Yourself With Some Fireside Feelings
The game is currently available on Steam and it’s fair to say we love this one! It reminds us a little bit of Tomorrow Corporations Little Inferno (2013), which has a unique memory burning concept.
Fireside Feelings is a very charming time of it and also has unique qualities.
It’s a globally interconnected game where you pick a character, sit around a fireside location, and share your feelings. You do this by typing your genuine thoughts in response to prompts, with your responses kept anonymous. You’re paired with another player’s genuine responses and have a heartfelt conversation with them.
Team Empreintes monitors all responses to make sure no one says anything grotesque. As the goal here is to be open, honest, and offload some of your experiences on empathetic strangers. Here’s our first session in action with responses from our very own Mr. Wapojif.
You can also set trigger filters on the questions so you wont’ have to deal with any questions you consider to be off limits.
It’s not the first game like this, as Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to) launched in September 2019 and offers much of the same positivity. And you can think of other games such as the awesome Coffee Talk 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly (2023) and, yeah, these games really bloody appeal to us.
This one resonates differently due to the player input.
It’s all about sharing experiences and expressing emotions. Some of the questions you respond to are quite personal, allowing you a cathartic personal release or, perhaps, helping a stranger somewhere overcome a personal problem.
None of this plays out in real-time, of course, the conversations from strangers are from a different TIME and PLACE. Maybe days ago, maybe months… either way, it’s all very introspective and uplifting.
We’ve found Fireside Feelings genuinely very useful for a mental health boost, especially given how awful this week of 14/09/25 has been across the US and UK.
When the world gets you down in this way, escapism is a great route out of it. And this game offers an anxiety release and a major push toward some welcome mental wellness. Thus, is you’re of a quieter nature then this game comes highly recommended.
It looks lovely, too, with that gorgeous art style. That’s complemented by a brilliant score, which we simply must highlight below. 🔥
Marwan de Carmentran’s Gorgeous Fireside Feelings Soundtrack
French composer Marwan de Carmentran offers a beautiful score to go with Fireside Feelings.
There’s a lot of piano at work at times, with plenty of ambiance, and it all first the game’s atmosphere perfectly. Quietly melancholic, but relaxing as well.
He also does variations on pieces, adding in wider orchestral sweeps and the like to add extra feels. All very lovely and one of our favourite indie game scores of 2025.
