Little Inferno is a 2012 indie puzzle game created by Kyle Gabler (World of Goo) and Kyle Gray (Henry Hatsworth) released for PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and Wii U. In the game, you sit in from of your very own Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace, wherein you can burn items ordered from catalogs ranging from creepy dolls to rotting food to miniature planets.
In the game, you collect coins to purchase items and unlock new catalogs, but when burned items produce more coins than they originally cost. The real cost to the player is time. Items take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes to arrive, though this can be sped up through the use of express delivery stamps. Stamps drop randomly and can also be earned by unlocking combo achievements.
There are 99 combo achievements total, which are earned through burning unique combinations of items together. The name of each achievement provides a hint of which items to use together, and a lot of the game’s fun comes from trying to solve each of the riddles. Some of them tax your lateral thinking, but I was able to solve all but four of them on my own, and there was only one that felt was unfairly obtuse.
Everything in the game has a dark sense of humor to it. All of the items have unique effects when burned, which can be pretty amusing. The animation takes obvious inspiration from the artwork of Tim Burton and possibly Don Hertzfeldt, which fits the tone of the game nicely, especially in the delightfully demented in-universe commercial.
What really sets this game apart though is its story. As you play, you receive letters from different characters who paint a dreary picture of the frozen world outside the game space where an entire city sit transfixed in front of their individual fireplaces as the soot from their chimneys darken the sky.
At its core, Little Inferno is a critique of the casual “Skinner box” games whose style it apes. It’s a game about how glowing screen timesinks can isolate people from one another and distract us from achieving what we truly want to do. It questions the destructive nature of obsessive consumerism where acquiring new possessions is an end unto itself and we quickly grow tired of new things as soon as we have them.
It would be easy for Little Inferno to promote a cynical take on exploitative free-to-play games and the type of people who play them, but it’s actually very sympathetic and hopeful. It recognizes how these games can sometimes provide comfort in a world that is often cold and distant, only warning of the danger such distractions have of consuming your life. I won’t spoil the phenomenal ending for you, but the message Little Inferno ultimately leaves you with is one of encouragement. Leave your comfort zone. Try new things. Dream bigger.
Little Inferno can be purchased for under $10 (price varies by platform) and completed in roughly 2–4 hours. It’s rare for a video game to be genuinely emotionally moving, and in that respect Little Inferno certainly succeeds. Its message will stick with you long after you put it down, and for a game that on the surface is nothing more than another casual time-waster, that’s quite an accomplishment.
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