Little Inferno

            It’s been snowing for years and nobody knows why. What do you do? Burn everything you own, of course! Little Inferno, the arson simulator developed by the Tomorrow Corporation, is a darkly comic and vaguely moving tale about a boy who buys things and then lights them on fire. The gameplay consists of lighting various objects on fire in different predetermined combos. For instance if you burn the toy pirate and the bicycle together, you get a combo. Combos give you money with which to buy more stuff to burn and stamps to deliver the stuff to your house faster. After getting enough combos and buying all of the things in your catalogue, you can buy…a new catalogue full of new things to burn and new combos! It all sounds kind of pointless written out here, and it is. That’s the point.

            The story doesn’t seem very interesting at first. Again, you’re a boy burning things in his shiny new Little Inferno Playset from the Tomorrow Corporation. Yes, the corporation in the game has the same name as the development team (which consists of three guys, by the way.) Then, a little girl named Sugar Plumps starts sending you letters. She is a little crazy, to say the least. Whenever one of her letters arrived, I always wondered if they had Adderall in this universe and, if so, how she had managed to stay off of it. Her letters, as well as letters sent by the head of the Tomorrow Corporation and a weatherman, all work together to reveal bits and pieces of the world they live in. It’s really cold, namely. Everyone is burning as much as they can to stay warm. Honestly it would have been nice if they’d been a little more specific with their story. Like Dear Esther and a lot of art actually, Little Inferno remains intentionally ambiguous to allow for discussion and the ideas of the audience to influence the narrative. It’s not exactly a blank slate, but more of a Rorschach test. You get a vague impression of what’s going on, but everything’s so abstract and sometimes downright random that it’s hard to pin. I think, for instance, that all of the Little Inferno sets are contributing to the cold snap. The soot is building up in the atmosphere and causing the Earth to cool, which in turn causes more burning. It’s the opposite of a runaway Greenhouse Effect. It never states this though so there’s no way to know. It’s just a theory I have.

            Though the narrative lacks substance, its integration into the gameplay is very well done. One thing that is certain about this game is that it is a commentary on the games we play today. Again the actual message is maddeningly up for interpretation, but consider the point of view. For most of the game all the player sees is the Little Inferno. The edges of the fireplace/toy form a graphic match of a television. The game consists of putting objects into this screen and then destroying them, which is essentially how developers make their games and the audience plays them, respectively. If I had to guess, and I do because I’m that type of person, I would say that this is a statement on modern gaming. The simplicity and the potential tedium of the gameplay points out how much we are willing to go through to achieve an end that doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a satire about how we play games that even goes so far as to question whether or not we should play games anymore. This satire mostly comes from the gameplay itself. While the letters and some late-game developments put it into sharper focus, it’s all there in the fire. The different objects you can order from the catalogue all have different effects when they are burned. Some pop, some change the color of the fire, some freeze things, some just scream horribly. When you are burning a teddy bear that watches you as it burns, it’s hard not to question whether or not we've

gone a little far in the video game violence department. It’s lightened slightly by the dark and referential humor in the game (the video game catalogue is the best) as well as the Burton-esque art style, but the deep disturbing knot in your stomach is still there.

            Little Inferno isn't a great game, but it’s got a lot of great ideas. It can be tedious, and the lack of story details can be frustrating. It tries to be artistic, weird, and enigmatic, and it achieves that to some extent but occasionally at the cost of fun. The best way to describe it is quirky. Quirky is an overused term that lost a lot of its meaning once Zooey Deschanel became famous and everyone started trying too hard to be different. That’s how this game feels. It’s trying too hard to have a different and interesting story. It’s trying too hard to connect with the fringe. It’s trying too hard to be weird and artsy. Again to its credit, Little Inferno is often effective and boasts some really interesting ideas and commentary. I thought the beginning of the ending was extremely well done, which will only really make sense if you play the game. I thought the creepy toys and the little touches like the music that plays while perusing the catalogues were also inspired. But then the actual ending comes and it makes you wonder what the point of it all was. I encourage everyone to try the game if they can. The developers deserve to be rewarded if only because they tried to make something deeper than Call of Duty: Dog Simulator. It’s a beautifully flawed work of art. Maybe next time, just don’t try so hard?