VideoGame Little Inferno is literally the worst game I have ever played
Little Inferno is literally the worst game I have ever played. It even beat out non-games like Dear Esther in terms of lack of gameplay, which is sad on many, many levels. What is Little Inferno? It is a fireplace simulator which is structured like a social game. You can buy items from a catalog to burn. You put them in your fireplace, and click on them to burn them - there are no tricks to this, this is literally all you do. These items then drop coins, which you have to manually pick up, as well as occasionally stamps. You then spend this money on more items to burn. You have to wait for your items to arrive, but you can spend the stamps to speed up this process. There is literally nothing else to the game.
Story
There is no real story to the game. While it attempts to pretend it has one by having your neighbor send you letters, calling it a "story" is pretty silly - it is very short, and it has no impact whatsoever on the gameplay and is uninteresting. There is no payoff to it. If you are willing to suffer through many hours of burning things in your fireplace, then you get to speak to a few people before the game ends. If you are so foolish as to do so, you will discover that it is still quite trite.
Gameplay
The closest thing to gameplay in the game are a list of 99 hints that you match up to items in your catalogue. Because of the sheer tediousness of the gameplay, this gets incredibly boring - many of the hints are obvious, but a few are sufficiently vague that you might fail the first few times you try to burn the correct combination of items, and when some of the items take 3 minutes to arrive (and you cannot reorder them immediately, you have to wait for a cooldown timer to reorder them, AND wait for them to arrive), it is just incredibly stupid. What do you get for the combos? A little cheer, no special animation, a little gold star next to the combo in your list, and some stamps to speed up some future buys. Saying that the game sucks is an understatement. It isn't even really a game, and you'd have more fun doing pretty much anything else.
Final Summary
There is no reason whatsoever to buy or play this game.
VideoGame Dream Bigger! An utterly beautiful game!
The Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace! It seems like everyone has one these days. Everyone I know has one... and everyone I don't know has one too! It's so toasty I could stay here forever!
Little Inferno is close to a perfect game, everything comes together to fit one purpose. The art style fits the tone exactly, the music is fantastic and appropriately placed, the gameplay complements and adds meaning to the message, and the message is important but also surprisingly helpful and uplifting. Every sentence feels carefully chosen and placed and laced with lots of hidden signficance. After one playthrough there's still much more for me to learn, but I've already taken in a lot and it's good to feel that it hasn't been tapped out yet. It's a short indie game, based around simple but addictive casual game mechanics. The one problem with the game is that eventually the gameplay becomes slightly too long and painful on your time. That's an important part of the theme, but it doesn't make it easier to bear. But with careful use of stamps that can be overcome.
This is as far as you need to go and should go if you haven't played the game. I won't spoil anything directly, but I want to talk about what the game's theme means and it really is better to discover it yourself.
Little Inferno is about your time being precious and the wonderful important things you can do with your life. It wants to make you question the time you place in grindy ultimately meaningless consumable media, but it doesn't condemn it or you for doing that. This is why the game doesn't feel annoying and preachy like it should have. The game is interesting and addictive and it's not unnatural to be sucked in and the people who make it are creative people living in the real world.
You can quickly be drawn into the static image of nothing but the fireplace in front of you and when things happen in the story you carry on playing the game, carry on looking at the screen and don't turn away to deal with whats happened. It is easy to be drawn into huddling around the fireplace ignoring the cold outside but the game doesn't treat you like a bad person for it. Rather it wants you to know that you're a better person than you think and you can always do more. When all your dreams are satisfied, what should you do? Dream bigger!
VideoGame An addicting, but ultimately overblown simple concept
I must say, playing Little Inferno was... interesting. This game is a perfect example of how to take a simple concept that would likely bore the player after the first 10 minutes of playing, and do everything in your power to stretch it to about 4 hours of surprisingly addicting and engaging experience.
Because let's face it, the game does just that. The core gameplay element, the fire simulation, would get boring pretty quickly if all you were able to do with it was just throwing wood into the fire and watching it burn. But the game decides to instead take this basic gameplay and run with it, by throwing loads and loads of very well-done fluff onto it.
You have tons of inflammable items at your disposal, and you have to buy and unlock them gradually by gathering coins (which you get by burning things) and by burning specific combinations of items. Many of the items have unique properties and will behave differently when exposed to fire, and sometimes when you merely put them inside the fireplace. While all that happens, the game keeps throwing Story Bread Crumbs at you to keep you interested in what happens next. All of this is tied together by the really good artstyle and exceptional music (if you played World of Goo, then you should know what to expect).
All of this results in a very addicting experience that will keep you engaged for these 4 hours it will take you to finish it. Maybe a little more, if you're inclined enough to try to find all the combinations. But at the end of the day, like I said before, it's just a simple basic gameplay element with tons of fluff thrown onto it. I personally don't regret buying the game, since it was an interesting and educating experience that taught me how to make the most out of very little. If it's on sale, then I suggest to give it a try.
My only problem with the game is the time delay mechanic. Every time you buy an item, you have to wait some time before you can use it. On top of that, every time you buy something, you also have to wait for the in-game shop to "restock" the item before you can buy it again. I find it to be an ultimately pointless arbitrary limitation that adds nothing to the game except preventing you from burning too many items too fast. I actually think it's a cheap padding trick, because without it, the game would probably last only 2 hours at best.