The game is really fair, here - most of the combos are easy to figure out based on the name in the given list, such as "wooden applause" requiring the two purchasable wooden hands, with a few real headscratchers in there to please the completionists. If you burn certain items together, you can find up to 99 combos, some of which are necessary to unlock more catalogs. Sometimes, you'll get weird letters from your neighbor which you can read (and then promptly burn). You burn and burn, purchase and burn (but that can't continue forever!), slowly unlocking new catalogs of items to buy and promptly burn. You play yourself, trapped in an hell of eternal winter, in front of your Tomorrow Corporation Little Inferno Fireplace, and you're cold, so you need to burn things to stay warm. The game itself is its own worst enemy - it's a skinnerbox. This one is the most distilled version of that - the gameplay is (mostly) limited to one panel of one room, but the story (if you can call it that) really goes some incredible places. Tomorrow Corporation is really good at giving their game worlds a sense of space and scope, despite actually being incredibly simple and contained to very few locations.
![combos little inferno combos little inferno](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2cj4bBIfyf4/maxresdefault.jpg)
Many, if not most, will disagree with that statement, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't just sit there staring at the screen a few times, really considering my own life. Honestly, this is one of the most electrifying themes I've seen in a game. It's a neat indie game regardless, just nothing all that gripping. I think because I'd already played this game it brought it down quite a bit. The items have fun flavor texts and creative catastrophes when they're burned. Background dressing to make the world feel scary while you huddle by the fireplace and watch the embers rise. The atmosphere and little bits of story are neat. It's also pretty short and really doesn't have a point narratively or mechanically.Īll that being said, this game came out a long time ago on phones, doesn't really deserve to be put up to the scrutiny i'm giving it. Now since I knew it was coming, not so much. The ending is a fun change of pace, I remember being blown away the first time I saw it. It's a bit fun to think up some combinations to burn and get extra stamps for it, but there really isn't anything interesting going on burn things to get money to burn more things.
![combos little inferno combos little inferno](http://infernofans.com/sites/default/files/images/items/100x100/canofsnakes.png)
The gameplay is pretty dry, designed around waiting and watching. It has the comfy, aloof, and dreary atmosphere that all their games have. Little Inferno was the next stop on my quest to play all the Tomorrow Corporation games. Normally I would give this a low score – but it was polished, and there was lots of love going into this by an indie studio – so I'm ramping it up to 60%. There might be some social message hidden here about games and gaming – or about the time we waste in front of computer screens – but I think everything is okay in moderation and the aim of the whole thing was lost on me. I won’t spoil the end to you – although even that felt a bit empty. There is a story running in the background, but it’s a bit unfocused and feels like an attempt to fill the time rather than provide anything meaningful. I don't mind word puzzles, but after a while, it all before a bit tedious. Still, I must admit that I didn’t enjoy the game much. The Music is composed to give the whole thing a pyromaniac satire feeling that suits the mode right. It's also very polished – the graphic, the fire, the effects when things burn, the sound – all meticulously done. It's kind of discovery on the go, and I must admit I never played anything quite like it. Some of the combo terms are wordplays, some relate to the physical shape of the items you burn, what they represent, or the effect that burning them produces.
![combos little inferno combos little inferno](http://tomorrowcorporation.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/LittleInfernoOnLinuxComputers.jpg)
For example, if the combo is a "time bomb", you will need to burn a clock and a bomb together. The puzzle element comes from trying to find the right items to burn together so they represent a pre-given combo. You exist in a world embraced by everlasting winter, and your only entertainment is wasting your time by ordering things off a catalogue and burning them. The game is a kind of a sandbox word puzzle game. I got it on the cheap and it looked interesting, so I gave it a go. I had no idea what the game was about when I set down to play it.