Little Inferno is a satire of exactly the kind of game it is. What Little Inferno is is a game much like Alchemy, which I mentioned in a recent review, only with free-to-play mechanics. You find yourself sitting in front of the Little Inferno Entertainment System, which is literally just a fireplace, and the game tasks you with buying all of the items from all of the catalogues and burning them. Burning stuff gets you money and unlocks more and more stuff to burn. The goal is technically to burn everything, but as a secondary, much more attractive goal, you are tasked with finding and making all of the combos from the combo list. The combos are things like "Movie Night", which requires you to burn a TV and a cob of corn at the same time. There are delivery times with each of the items in the catalogues, with longer times for more expensive stuff. These delivery times can be upwards of 4 minutes real time, but can be sped up using stamps, which are earned at random or from completing combos. As you play, you will periodically get letters from the Tomorrow Corporation about new catalogues and from your neighbor, a young girl equally obsessed with staring into the fire (the letters of which you can burn for free moola). Weather reports will come in giving you the state of things outside of your drab little room with your fireplace. It seems the world has been suffering from perpetual snow and a long decline in global temperatures, without any sign of stopping or slowing down. The city, as described by the weatherman, is forest of chimneys and smokestacks emptying into the sky. The weather reports can be burned. Your neighbor will occasionally ask for gifts, will occasionally question whether what you are doing is right while simultaneously professing her love for the the warmth of the fireplace and the dazzling destruction therein.
You probably see the satire already. The game is attempting to criticize the casual game market. You buy useless stuff to burn inside of your game, you use alternate currencies - currencies that are doled out based on spending money - in order to prevent the game from wasting your time. It is sardonic, ironic, and a host of other literary devices, but the meaning is moot if the game is what it sets out to satirize. Sub-par satire is easy to identify because it always makes one key error that takes the air out of its lungs: being a self aware version of what you satirize isn't enough for good satire, and as a matter of fact isn't satire, it just insults your audience. While it is easy to point out things you want to satirize from within, asking your audience to participate is analogous to making someone a ham sandwich and criticizing them for eating ham. You served it up as a dirty trick. Your goal is for me to experience what you created, so telling me that I'm wrong to have done so is not only counter-intuitive, but shows that you aren't interested in saying something meaningful so much as saying something critical of me, the audience. Satire from inside isn't always a terrible thing, but it needs to avoid or otherwise undermine the primary mechanics or tropes you are wishing to satirize. Satire provokes, it doesn't lecture. It creates situations that are absurd to provoke contrasting emotions, to provide a conflict between what is presented and how it is presented. The issue with Little Inferno is in how it gives you no choice but to play the shitty game they want to satirize. Your choice is irrelevant, outside of choosing to play the game it wants to criticize you for playing. If you were somehow able to undermine the game's premise, it might have something to say. As it is, the game takes on a game incarnation of those edgy, "satiric", and anti-consumerist comic strips splattered all over the walls of Facebook.
The worst part is that I actually found the game fun. I've said before I like these little "find all the combination" games, and this one is no exception on a basic level. Most of the combinations were good and well telegraphed with the combo title in the list, it's just that the game really isn't any more than that. I'm trying to keep this spoiler free, so I don't want to give away the ending, but it does little to tie together the various themes. You get some brief talk about the corporation and the world at large, but it feels a bit like an attempt at being more than the game actually is without fully succeeding. It attempts at a fairy tale tone by the end that feels to be justifying the art style more than the plot. Little Inferno is a fun distraction, and an insulting satire. It is worth a play if you've nabbed it in a Humble Bundle, but not to go out of your way for. But nothing can overcome a design that inherently wants you to sort of not like it.
5.5
No comments:
Post a Comment