Little Inferno is one of the first indie titles on the Wii U eShop and the newest game from new developer studio, Tomorrow Corporation. Tomorrow Corporation was created by some major indie developers, Kyle Gabler and Allan Blomquist who worked on World of Goo and Kyle Gray who worked on Henry Hatsworth. These developers have been known for their great work in the video game industry so naturally I only expect the best with Little Inferno and I’m happy to report the game lives up to my expectations.

 

Video Review

When you first begin your story in Little Inferno, you’re introduced to your own little fire place or little inferno where you’ll be burning a lot of different items to keep warm. Upon starting the game, you’ll find a sign on the fire place explaining that you can use the Gamepad’s touch screen to light a fire, Ironically the first thing you burn is the sign after you finish reading it. Additionally you get a a terms and conditions for the fire place that guess what? You’ll also burn. Literally you’ll burn just about everything, even ice (technically). Inside the fireplace is a little face made of metal that stares at your throughout the entire game. It gives of a creepy feeling while you burn everything. Think what would a game look like if Tim Burton designed a game, well Little Inferno would be it.

Now I’ve been asked if you all do in the game is burn stuff? I’ve been asked this countless time and yes that’s all you do but it’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds. You begin with a shopping catalogue where you can purchase items for you to burn in your little inferno. From there you keep burning and burning items until you’ve gone through all your items and completing the “story” aspect of Little Inferno. Each item in catalogues cost money, you earn money by burning items. Burning items drop coins that you can collect and then use to buy more items. The items also have some humorous tones to them like the description of the following items:

• Gaming Tablet: Filled with “free” games that will cost you thousands.
• Internet Cloud: Repository of all human hope and knowledge. Now almost entirely cat photos and loneliness.

Aside from coins, burning items also drop tickets that you can use to ship items from the catalogue faster to you. Unlocking new catalogues requires you to purchase all the items in the previous catalogue, pay a certain amount of money for the new catalogue, and reach a certain amount of combos. Speaking of combos, combos play a major role in Little Inferno. They act as the achievement system in Little Inferno and are also needed to progress through the story in Little Inferno. You can perform a combo when you burn two or more items that fit the description of a combo. Most of these combos are easy to figure, for example the cat lady combo. You simply burn a cat doll and an old lady doll.

The story of Little Inferno is told in forms of letters. You receive letters from multiple people like a employee of Tomorrow Corporation, the company that manufactures the Little Inferno,a young girl who somehow knows just about everything about you, and the  the weather man who’s the only man reporting on the state of the world outside your home. Oh I forgot to mention you can burn these letters after you read them as well. Like I said you burn just about everything.

While I’m on the subject of burning, each item you burn is unique, so you won’t ever really get bored of burning items all the time. Each items gives you different results most of the time depending on the item. Burning corn will pop pieces of pop corn across your little inferno. Burning a credit card will shoot out cash from the card. Burning a cat doll will make it poop, yes poop. The amount of creativity of these items are truly amazing and very humorous at times.

However if these unique item characteristics or story style doesn’t keep you hooked to Little Inferno, then you’ll most likely find Little Inferno repetitive and even boring. Personally, I was excited to see what each item did when I burned it. I wanted to follow Little Inferno’s narrative, I wanted to know what would happen to these people I’ve met through letters. I found the combos were challenging at time but not enough to  get me frustrated, finding out the combos were actually really fun.

Little Inferno is a fun and unique game. It’s burning gameplay mechanic may not be for everyone but it’s a innovating and certainly something interesting to experience. It’s dark yet humorous, something that I can best describe as a Tim Burton theme. It really connects to you, leaving a mental note that tackles issues like corporatism and isolation in a very dark but amusing way. Now if you excuse me I’M GOING TO BURN MORE STUFF!!!!!