CSaur Plays: Little Inferno

So over the Steam holiday sale, I managed to pick up Little Inferno. It’s a small, casual game with no real objective. You are simply plopped in front of a fire place and given catalogs to buy things from. What do you do with those things? Burn them.

The only real objectives you are given, and these are optional, is to create special combos with the items you burn. There is a list of 99 combos you can make (plus one special combo), and each one has a name relating to what items you need to burn together. For example, the “Movie Night Combo”, is simply an ear of corn (which when burned, turns to popcorn) and the television. Obviously, as you go through the game and unlock more catalogs, the combos will get harder to decrypt and will be more expensive. Luckily, every time you burn an item, you receive coins back which you can spend on more items to burn.

Personally, I found this game extremely relaxing, which is exactly what I’ve needed recently (Too much yelling during DotA 2, etc.) and each time I managed to figure out a combo, I felt rewarded. I was a little bit shocked that there was an actual ending to the game, but at the same time I didn’t feel disappointed at the length. It took me about 3 hours total complete it, and the vague idea of a story line filled that time quite nicely. Honestly, it’s hard to say a lot about this game since there isn’t much to it, other than it makes the player feel quite relaxed and rewarded when you get the combos and unlock the next ‘stage’.

Sadly, the game seems to have very little replay value, as once you’ve figured out all 99 combos (as I did in my first run), they don’t add any more if you start a new game. But if you don’t mind that, and still want to just play the game and look at the great effects, then there’s nothing stopping you from playing again.

Overall I’d say it’s a great little game, very relaxing and easy to understand. It’s not very long and so makes for a good evening of game play, although that depends on how quickly you can figure out the combos. The ending sequence style did remind me of limbo a little, but I don’t want to spoil too much of that. It’s a little disappointing that there aren’t different combos for different play through slots, but obviously there is only so much that you can put together. If you see it in a summer or holiday sale, I’d say pick it up, but it’s not a game I would personally pay full price for.