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.