Little Inferno is a very light game, choosing to treat the main centerpiece (a large fireplace) as a toy for combining and burning strange and wacky objects.
Taking place in a dreary and cold city that just keeps getting colder, the citizens are encouraged to buy weird objects through catalogs and burn them in their fireplaces. Stuck inside your house, …
Little Inferno is a very light game, choosing to treat the main centerpiece (a large fireplace) as a toy for combining and burning strange and wacky objects.
Taking place in a dreary and cold city that just keeps getting colder, the citizens are encouraged to buy weird objects through catalogs and burn them in their fireplaces. Stuck inside your house, you order from up to seven catalogs, waiting for deliveries, burning them, and grabbing cash from the ashes, as well as unlocking more catalogs with achievement-style combinations of burnt items.
The burning process is quite therapeutic, offering some intriguing little fire physics at work and producing all manner of crazy effects from what burns. Screaming toast out of a toaster? Corn on the cob that pops into popcorn? An old lady who swallowed a fly and now flies are swarming out of her burning bo- you get the idea. The humor is wacky and not afraid to go into some morbidly twisted regions. As for waiting on things to arrive, combos and burning can produce express tickets to speed up time that can be wisely managed.
Behind this gameplay loop is a story about people trying to connect through the walls of their house, the letters they send, and the fire that eventually consumes their lives. For a light-hearted looking tale, it's extraordinarily pessimistic, and a second act throws the loop away into walks that don't entirely fit the game. That said, it gives some extra understanding to this fiery madness.
The story might not be particularly welcome, but this toy is a joy to fiddle with, inspiring creative thinking of which items burn with which and a fervent joy of seeing what happens when something catches fire.
