Review: Little Inferno
The Wii U, released on 11/18, has a good assortment of games available, both in stores and through the Nintendo E-Store. A happy surprise is the large number of smaller indie games available on the system, and of them all, the most blissfully wacky is Little Inferno, from the Tomorrow Corporation, makes of World of Goo. Little Inferno combines the infuriating “What do I DO?” feeling of the open form game, the dark whimsy of a Tim Burton movie, and the purifying warmth of fire, and creates a deceptively simple game that unfolds like an onion in a deep fryer, and is just as delicious.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0TniR3Ghxc]
The game consists of a fireplace, more specifically, the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace. Your job – burn things. Buy things from a series of catalogs of flammable objects, place them in the furnace, set them aflame, find money contained within, use the money to buy more things to burn. Lather, rinse, repeat. As you buy objects, more become available. As you burn more and more, you begin receiving mail from the manufacturer, congratulating you on your proficiency. Letters also begin arriving from another Little Inferno owner who seems to have learned a bit more about the company, and the purpose of the fireplace.
The game is dark, disturbing, and tantalizing. Exactly WHY does the magnet make the gears in the Fireplace spin faster? Where did Someone Else’s Credit Card come from, and why can you buy then in almost infinite quantity? Why is the world getting colder?
For a company as family-friendly as Nintendo to select such a bent little masterpiece for not only a game for its new console, let alone a day-of-release game, is a bold move indeed. This is a game CLEARLY not for everybody (It’s rated T-for-Teen), but for those who like dark humor, not to mention burning things, it’s a perfect little brain-bender.
Related articles
- ‘Little Inferno’ Review – Setting The World On Fire (multiplayerblog.mtv.com)