Little Inferno Review

Who doesn’t love toys? They’re just so fun to play with! But what’s better than playing with them? Burning them!! Little Inferno allows you to do just this, fulfilling the more psychopathic side of one’s personality.

While its basic mechanics may cause some to see this game as similar to a Facebook game (where you have to click a box and wait real-time for the selected item to appear), if you look a little closer you will understand and appreciate the true beauty of this game. The idea is that you burn items to get money, and then use that money to buy more items to burn. It’s a simple cycle but one that never seems to grow boring. What makes the game all the more entertaining is that each item has a different reaction to being burnt: some sing, some smash, and then there are those that explode and make such a noise you’ll have to cover your ears.

Being a fan of simplistic puzzle games I found Little Inferno very addictive, and I wasted hours on end burning items just to buy new ones when I could have instead been doing constructive things like homework or reading. A problem with Little Inferno, in fact, is that when you go back from it to more mundane tasks you’ll have to resist to urge to set fire to all your homework and watch it burn (resist the urge even more than normal, I mean)! One aspect that increases the fun is the ragdoll physics; there is nothing better than throwing around an old lady doll and then burning the pieces to dispose of the evidence. The array of items to mess around with was amazing; there were 7 catalogues that could be unlocked using money when you had enough combinations, each with a load of items to purchase and subsequently destroy.

Although this game could be misinterpreted as being too simple, that is actually even more behind the Little Inferno fire-place. There is an amazing story for those who worked through the game long enough, which takes you through the twisted world that is freezing up around you. Along with this there is also some very funny humour. For example, one item available to burn is a bottle of alcoholic drink, labelled in the catalogue as “Midlife Crisis Mitigator”.

I really liked how this game appeals to your insane side that secretly wants to be an arsonist, but has never had the balls (or enough petrol). Little Inferno also has a lot of combos for you to figure out, meaning that its appeal isn’t limited to those who would probably be safer locked up somewhere and does provide actual challenging gameplay. The combos mean you have to select the correct few items which you have to burn together. With 99 combinations in total, it’ll take you a while to complete this game fully. And even then, the fun of burning things will never end. On top of all this, Little Inferno has an outstanding soundtrack. I enjoyed it so much that I downloaded it from the Tomorrow Corporation site (available free of charge if you similarly enjoy it).

I’m going to give Little Inferno 9 out of 10 due to how perfect and polished it was overall. There were no real bad points that I had to make about this game. The burning part of the game was enough to amuse me, but when I dived in to see an actual quality story I was truly amazed. Little Inferno is excellent. It’s games like these that make me praise indie developers.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.