Campfires are very important in DarkMaus, just like bonfires in Dark Souls.  They let you heal, but also revive any regular enemies in the area.  They are the only place where you can spend your gathered Marrow to level up, and resting at one saves the game.

In earlier versions of DarkMaus I used campfires only as regular checkpoints – if you died you would lose any progress after the checkpoint.  After some playtesting I noticed a few things.

People didn’t want to explore anymore because the cost of dying was too high.  In order to retain items you picked up from exploring you had to make it back to a campfire.  if you continued exploring and then died (which happens A LOT) you would lose those items and have to get them again.

Another problem was that the replayability of areas was reduced and there was no more opportunity for grinding for levels if you got stuck on a hard part.  You would kill each enemy once in a successful run and never deal with him again.

The Dark Souls bonfire mechanic solves all of these problems and makes you consider your exploration options in a whole new way, so I borrowed it.  It’s really an amazing gameplay mechanic and I wonder why we don’t see more games innovating in how the saving works.  We generally get automatic checkpoints or save-anytime (aka save crawl in a hard game).