When I first saw Little Inferno on Steam, I immediately fell in love with it. I'm not sure what it was that lured me to it; it could be the cutesy art style combined with the homey feeling of sitting in front of a warm fireplace as it gently snowed outside...or it could simply be the fact that I love setting things on fire. Either way, this was a game I just had to play. Seriously, just watch the trailer;
What the hell? No, seriously. What the hell? So we've got kids dancing around in front of a fireplace, burning their toys to stave off the cold, and then all hell breaks loose and everything burns to the ground. Did Tim Burton direct this? Anyway, we've got a seemingly innocent game with a nightmarish twist, and it involves burning things. There's no way I'm going to pass this up.
Now I'm sure at this point everyone's curious; what's the point of this game? Well it's pretty much like the trailer shows; you're a child left alone in front of your Little Inferno Fireplace and you need to burn things to stay warm. There's no time limit or health or anything, and you won't freeze to death if you don't set anything on fire for too long. Nothing like that; it's just a casual game where you order toys from a catalog and then set them ablaze when they arrive.
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| The flame effects are simply beautiful. |
Each toys have different reactions when set on fire, and when they burn up they give you money so you can buy more toys to burn. You make progress through buying every toy in the catalog as well as making combos, which is just burning specific toys together at once. Buy some toys to burn for cash so you can buy more toys for even more cash to buy even more toys and etc. It sounds repetitive and boring, but the different reactions that each toys have help keep things interesting.
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| My personal favorite is the Valkyrie Doll. Once you set it on fire, it starts singing and rose petals rain from above. When she burns through and stops singing, roses fall around her. It's one of the more hauntingly beautiful things I've ever seen. |
You also get letters from people as you progress through the game, which you can burn as well for some quick cash (the letters, not the people). There's Miss Nancy, the CEO of the Tomorrow Corporation (the company that made the Little Inferno Fireplace), Sugar Plumps, the neighbor girl who asks you for certain items and returns the favor with unique items (which you then set fire to), and the Weather Man, who gives you updates about the outside world (which is usually "It's so coooold!!!"). What's interesting about these letters is how they help establish the tone of the story that the actual game-play is trying to distract you away from. One minute you're setting a can of soda on fire and watching it explode, and the next minute you're reminded that the weather is getting colder and colder and the snow just doesn't seem to be stopping...at which point you shrug and go right back to setting smoke detectors on fire. (The story is actually pretty good, with several shocks and twists. Won't spoil anything here, but it's definitely one of those stories that leaves you thinking about it for a while.)
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| Keep this coupon. It's really tempting to burn it, but it's the key to the "secret" ending. |
Now, while I do love this game, that's not to say that it doesn't have its faults. Its biggest flaw would be the wait time between item deliveries. When you buy a toy from the catalog, it's not immediately added to your inventory. You actually have to wait a bit for it to arrive. The earlier items take anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds, but the later items can take anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes. You do get special tickets to cut down on the delivery time, but the entire thing feels like one of those iPhone games or something ("My Lord! It will take 10 minutes for the barracks to be completed! However, you can complete it instantly if you use 5 Diamonds, available for purchase in the app store in packs of 10, 50 and 100."). Not sure if the game is trying to make some sort of social commentary with that feature, but it does get pretty annoying.
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| Unfortunately, a longer wait doesn't necessarily mean the toy is awesome. |
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| No, really. Guess. |
And they just repeat that constantly. "Nothing lasts forever!" "There's always an end!" "Enjoy things while you can!". I haven't seen a message this hamfisted since the whole health insurance thing in Saw VI. It's actually not that profound of a message, so I have no idea why they keep bringing it up. I honestly think they brought it up too many times. If they had mentioned it once or twice in the beginning of the game, I would've completely forgotten about it until the end of the game, at which point I'd look back on it and be genuinely impressed while saying something along the lines of, "Oooooooh, that's what she meant." But as the way it is now, it's just repeated so many times that it pretty much sets up and gives away the end of the game long before you reach it. That's unfortunate, since the ending is definitely much better left a surprise. I usually enjoy letters from these NPCs, but whenever they mention how nothing lasts forever, I just had to roll my head back and groan.
Despite these flaws, however, Little Inferno is a genuinely fun experience. There aren't that many games like this out there, and it's just silly fun to kill some time. Obviously it won't hold your attention as long as Skyrim will, but if you've got a quick hour or two to kill, you could do much worse. I would assume the price would be a turn-off for a lot of people ($14.99 for a game you'll most likely complete in a few hours), but if you get it during a sale it's definitely worth it.
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| (Actual warning that shows when starting up the game) WARNING : DO NOT PLAY WITH FIRE. Now let's set your toys on fire, kids! YAAAAY! |
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