Little Inferno

Little Inferno is a strange game, and doesn't make much attempt to explain what the point of it is. You see a fireplace and the game instructs you to drag items into it and then set it on fire. After that, it tells you that you aren't scored and have no time limit; but you still don't know what the aim is. After guessing that I had to click the coins that fell from the burned items to collect them, I then began exploring the HUD and stumbled across the catalogue. In the catalogue, you can order objects to be delivered which you then can burn. Coins always pop out of burned objects at a higher value than you paid, so you keep ordering more and burning them to make money. As you order, more objects become available, and by a bit of luck, you create a combo which is a pre-determined combination of burned objects.

When you create a combo, you get a token which can be used to speed up the delivery time of objects you order. As it turns out, there is also a menu to show these combos, which provides you with a combo name and the number of items required (either 2 or 3 objects), and is then down to logical reasoning and a bit of guesswork. It was at this point I was like “so this is the point of the game!”. And so the task begins to discover the 100 set combinations.

Once you order all the objects in the catalogue and have reached a combo target; a new catalogue becomes available which unlocks more possible combinations due the new items it gives you. The catalogue items are a strange collection since some are every day/normal items like plates, bricks, fans and food, but then there are objects like spiders nests, planets and a mini nuke. In the last set there are some conceptual items such as computer worm, internet cloud, and email which are very strange since they aren't physical. There are plenty of items that seem like cuddly toys but their large googly moving eyes are somewhat disturbing, especially when you are throwing an old woman on the fire.

From time to time, you receive a letter from someone. This could be from the person next door who is also burning things in the fire, or from the weatherman who updates you on the global freeze, or from Miss Nancy who created the fireplace 'Little Inferno'. These events provide a basic story and help give you a sense of progress, and completing the story line will give you the end credits, but you can still load up your save and carry on to complete the combo list.

Graphically, the game looks very sharp and is wonderfully animated. It is full of charm and is very surprising how fun it is to throw random objects on the fire. The game will last around 4 hours and I'd imagine some people may pick this up on occasion just to satisfy their arsonist urges. It is simple enough for anyone to play and can be played at your own pace, but parents will probably be cautious given that it encourages kids to throw toys on the fire!

For obvious reasons, I was skeptical that a game built upon the absurdly minimal idea of sitting still and setting fire to a random array of objects would keep my attention long enough to play til the end, let alone rate and review for this site. But then I beat Little Inferno in a single playthrough in what felt like minutes without noticing it had been hours.
Clearly the game was contrived to feel bizarre: set in this disturbing dystopian future where global freezing has become a bigger problem than global warming, filled with characters designed with an artistry akin to the style of Tim Burton, and written with a sense of humor so dark and twisted you wouldn't spot it in a bag of black licorice.
The unsettling atmosphere is meant to be uncomfortable to enhance the game's comedy, which in turn is used to juxtapose its sudden bursts of seriousness. But for real, the sheer bleakness of Little Inferno is actually really funny. There's already something comical in presenting a mundane fireplace as a safe and marketable children's toy to channel one's suppressed pyromania; but to add hysterical twists to the "deaths" of various items just makes the game funny to the point you actually start feel insulted by the other "comedy" games that don't even make you smile.
Alas, the fun doesn't last very long. The story takes some rough turns to reach an abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion; but it was never the story that I totally cared about; I delighted in the idiot-proof gameplay concept that the developers exploited as far as they could, squeezing every shocking novelty there is in the scenario, which was all great comedy and bleak storytelling.
Little Inferno is worth the small price it demands. Albeit brief, the humor here is exclusive to interaction -- unable to make with other mediums like films or books, since the jokes are practical to the player -- so play it if you don't want to miss out on some good "interactive" jokes.

Little Inferno feels and plays too much like one of those games filled with microtransactions (except its not). You burn stuff to get money to burn more stuff, while slowly a narrative unravels. It forces the player to wait so much in order to play the game. The upgrade addition is the main reason to keep playing, which i found not to be enough.

The game does have a cool ending, but not really worth getting through all of the slog it is.