Beta Test #7: Little Inferno
Little Inferno
Ah, fire. The true nomadic milestone. The vibrating atoms, the fun red colour, the scolding heat of having burned your hand on a flaming marshmallow back in 2011 at an underage house party, and giving yourself a permanent scar on your middle finger. Fire—pretty great, and in this weather, I’m more likely to throw myself into an open inferno than restrain myself from the searing pain, because my body runs at the pace of a sloth with arthritis. Do you wanna build a snowman on my cold frozen corpse? Not if I jump into Dante’s open arms first!
As the popular twitter handle @dril says, ‘I will face god and walk backwards into hell.’ And in this cold? I’ll be laughing all the way.
…
It’s been a month.
Hello, my little pyromaniacs! I’m a Bethany Griffiths and this is Beta Test. A game review platform where I—a C O L D , self confessed noob—choose one game a month to go ham on until either I get better or get wrecked. All in the hopes that I can provide you with a completely unbiased review.
Behold! Winter is here, and not only has it got the metaphorical keys to its dad’s comero to drive me personally to the land of frozen toes and hypothermia, but it also comes with the most impressive thing known to man since the wooden club. Fire! Yes, the cold is well and truly here and with it, I find myself struggling to get back into the world of the living (why is waking up at 6am so damn depressing?) which is why I’m playing Little Inferno this month.
Developed and Published by Tomorrow Corporation, Little Inferno is a peaceful puzzle game, with no timers or, surprisingly, bad consequences. Set in a time where an eternal winter has taken over your town, you are given the pyromaniacs version of an easy bake oven to calm your otherwise terrified tenancies and burn all your worldly possessions. But all is not quite right in your home and soon you bare witness to the realisation that the fireplace is your only pastime. When you start receiving mysterious messages from your next door neighbour, your world is turned upside down and you start to uncover the truth.
I found it really easy to figure out the mechanics, and if you didn’t want to delve into the deeper plot lines, I could see this being a therapeutic game, say, for hard days in the office where you really want to staple the refund policy to a person that just bought back an eight-month-old set of walkie talkies. Get home, put on some slippers, grab a glass of red, set things alight. I think the relief of being rid of ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ could be a catalyst for relaxation, and it was really satisfying.
If you did want to delve into the law though, Little Inferno is a titillatingly intelligent critique on the level of cyber intake the world is engaging in, as well as climate change, corporate solitude, and escapism. The take on every computer generated medium known to the world isn’t lost here and was pretty much my gateway to getting the point of it all. The creators threw in flappy bird references and plants vs zombies cliches, for those of us that are too distracted by pretty fire to figure out the metaphor by ourselves (me), but the message was clear.
What I really loved about this game was that nothing actually insidious was going on behind the scenes. It reminded me of an early Studio Ghibli movie, where you’re waiting the entire time to meet the big bad guy—the thing that you can put all your negativity and hatred towards in a shameless cycle of self righteousness—but in the end, it’s just a show about you, the kid, trying to make their way in the world, stumbling on adult truths and meeting friends along the way. The ending was also really valuable to me, because it conveyed this sense of getting out and letting go that I’ve really needed to be more aware of in the past few months.
I found the way the game is set to critique the playing of itself to be on the nose, but in a good way. I enjoyed the way the player is set up to delve deeper and deeper into the string theory, to try and find something more sinister or visceral. The Steam forums, which I spent near days scrolling through, were abundant in alternate ending theories, best play routes, and conspiracies about the main characters. While I will always applaud the gamers keen enough to explore every nook of the game, I think Little Inferno is softly laughing at you. There is no hidden hate, no dead kids, no apocalypse now. Just the real world, in all its natural state, staring back at you sitting in front of your mass produced plastic box, staring into the abyss, burning the midnight oil as well as your life away. And I think that is the point. Or at least, that was the point for me.
Because of the intrigue of the game play, and the way it made me think, I give this game:
4/5 Fire starters for style
3/5 Fire starters for plot line
5/5 Fire starters for easiness
4/5 Fire starters for the impending sense of dread that never actually comes to fruition
So, after that explosive awakening, what remains? The distrust in the universe? You can’t go back, only forward. What’s burned is burned, and once everything around you is ash, what do you do? Well, like the late great Robin Williams once said, ‘Carpe Diem, seize the day, boys.’ Today, and this month, I leave you with a much more sombre message than what I thought I would—Find the happy in the world. Don’t just fill the void with flame and hope that it’ll keep burning exponentially. It won’t.
In any case, I’ve been a Bethany Griffiths, and this has been an somewhat more sobering Beta Test. A game review platform where I either got better or got wrecked. All in the hopes that I can provide you with a completely unbiased review.
Until next time.
FRED the ALIEN Productions 