Little Inferno

"That's it? That's all you do?" The first time I ever saw Little Inferno I was at a friend's house. I had heard of the game and knew it was receiving a fair amount of hype. When I finally saw it in action though, my heart sank. The art direction was interesting, but not really my thing and the game just seemed really shallow. All the player really does is burn things. The "puzzle" elements turned out to just be burning multiple things at the same time. Not particularly sophisticated stuff.

A month or two later I ended up buying it on iPad. I had read some other reviews and decided that $5 wasn't too much to pay. After spending a day playing the game feverishly I can honestly say that I now understand the pull. It's fun and weirdly satisfying. At the same time, it was a pretty short game that didn't leave me particularly wowed. 

The gameplay consists of ordering toys, throwing those toys into the fireplace and watching them burn. In order to unlock new toy catalogs, the player must burn certain combinations of toys at the same time. Each combination has a clever title that is displayed in an easily accessible list, it is up to the player to extrapolate the actual combination of toys which must be burnt from this title. Figuring out these combinations is the only challenge present in Little Inferno.

Weirdly, after playing for a couple of minutes I was compelled to play more, and more until about two and a half hours later when I realized I needed to be somewhere. Little Inferno pulls the oldest entertainment trick in the book. Before we played video games, before we watched movies, even before we read books, we had fire. There is something about the look and sound of a small blaze that is comforting and fun to watch. How else do we explain the Yule Log channel? Little Inferno has excellent fire effects and excellent sound effects and somehow that was enough to keep me interested. I can't say it's a good game, but it is a compelling one.

Ni No Kuni

When it comes to video games, my tastes tend to lean more towards the adult side. "Kidsy" games just tend to kind of annoy me. This is not to say I won't play something with cartoony graphics or a happy go lucky disposition, it just means those traits aren't particularly appealing to me. There had better be some serious gameplay behind those graphics if you want to keep me interested.

I didn't really hear or care about Ni No Kuni until after it came out. The Studio Ghibli art looked pretty but not like something I'd want to play. Likewise, the nauseatingly cute screenshots I saw did nothing to recommend it to me. But after reading a couple of reviews and seeing it in action, something clicked inside of me. Nostalgia.

What I saw was a bunch of elements from different things I liked as a kid, primarily anime, Final Fantasy and the original Pokemon game. Ni No Kuni borrows heavily from all three. Any number of games have appeared over the years boasting a heavy influence from one or two of these things and every one has either looked boring to me or hasn't managed to hold my interest for more than a couple of days. All three of them together though, created an overpowering nostalgia fueled compulsion to play and enjoy this game.

I can't really say Ni No Kuni is a good game on its own. It's not original, lets just get that out of the way. The plot is a well joined together series of cliches, flowing nicely while constantly reminding me why I no longer enjoy much Anime. The battle system tries to innovate but just ends up feeling like a slightly clunkier, but prettier version of one of the millions of menu based systems we've all seen. Cute monster collection, has of course been done once or twice before as well.

Yet somehow they combine in just the right way to give me something deeply satisfying. A lot of it has to do with the completeness of the experience. The world feels fleshed out. The game feels huge, yet much more focused than any of the massive sandbox games available to buyers. I always feel a sense of urgency to continue moving the main plot along while playing Ni No Kuni, the game constantly reminding the player where the next mission is, even though there are plenty of side quests available. I like this, as I generally find that sandbox games pull me in for a while, but rarely compel me to actually experience the hundreds of hours of gameplay that they advertise.

Ni No Kuni then is a deeply satisfying and well thought out balance. Through either dumb luck or genius subtlety in game making, Ni No Kuni is a game that is greater than the sum of its parts. I want to deride it for its childishness, for its unoriginality and its predictability. But none of that matters when I'm immersed in its colors, reliving just enough of my favorite games to keep me on a nostalgic roller coaster through its world.