Game EXP: Little Inferno (NS)

Little Inferno is a game that I apparently knew about as it was sitting dormant in my Steam library for I am not sure how long, but it did not officially/technically peak my brain's interest until recently when I purchased it for the Nintendo Switch.  What really cemented the decision to purchase the game was re-watching the trailer that is on Nintendo's eShop.  The combination of the hilarity of a game based around burning objects (the artistic design of said objects was equally important) and the overly dramatic music that played during the second half of the trailer dwarfed all of the accolades mentioned at the beginning of the trailer.

The beginning of the catalog with a limited amount of purchacables.

So Little Inferno is a point and click game developed by The Tomorrow Corporation where you purchase objects using in-game currency and burn them in a fireplace.  Those burnt objects produce slightly more money than what you paid for said object, and then you go back and do it all over again.  You are able to buy subsequent items in the catalog only after you buy the item before it and you are unable to buy the next catalog with new items until you have bought all of the items in your current catalog.  As is the case with the real world, there are shipping times (ranging from five seconds to five minutes) from when you order a product to when it arrives, but those can be ignored by using "Tomorrow Stamps" which are earned by killing spiders, completing combos and you know, burning stuff.

So that is the basic premise of the game.  You buy stuff, you burn stuff, you get money from burnt stuff, you buy more stuff.  Repeat.

Except there is a story, which I admit caught me a little off guard and was more emotionally impactful than a game about burning objects in a fireplace is probably supposed to have.  But I am going to leave it at that because, you know, spoilers.

Now, when I first started this game, I was using the Switch out of docked mode, thinking that I would use the Joy-Cons to move around the finger I saw in the trailer, but it turned out that when the Switch is not docked, the game operates only via the touch screen, which I had no problem with.  But, when the game is docked, you have to use the Joy-Cons as you would the motion controls on the Wii, but that since there is no infrared bar, the game uses the integrated accelerometer and gyroscope to track the movement across the screen while being able to (and needing to I might add) re-calibrate the controllers at anytime with only minor interruption.  This re-calibration became an issue during our first session with the game and became very distracting and frustrating, especially when trying to either buy specific objects in the store or placing fragile objects in the fireplace.  Eventually the problem went away after switching Joy-Cons; battery power, distance from the Switch, bad angle on my part?  No one knows.

Sorry, I Forgot To Warn About Spoilers.

Since this game is now five years old, buying on the Switch may not be the most economical way of playing (lack of sales and all), but the one main difference for Little Inferno on the Switch is that the Switch version can be played as a cooperative game, which is how Conklederp and I spent the 5 hours 23 minutes reaching the end of the game in just a handful of sittings; it was more than one and less than five, I know that much.  And surprisingly, Little Inferno works great as a co-op game, mainly because the game has 99 combos you can earn by burning two or three specific objects together.  These combos are hinted at by name such as "Lender's Combo" or "LOL Kitty Combo."  Most of the titles are pretty easy to figure out when you read the description of the items, or just by the items themselves, but there are others like the "Rosy Combo" or the "Planes and Trains Combo" that have managed to elude us.  This adds a fun word puzzle solving component to an otherwise repetitive game which works well between two people who, in my own opinion, communicate pretty well together.  The only other advantage I can see, is being able to ever so slightly faster than normal select and purchase items.

So, if you have a Switch, go ahead and pick up Little Inferno and play co-op, but if you don't, I would still highly recommend picking up this game on any one of the other platforms (PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android) it has been released on in the last five years and turn it into your own single player co-op game.  And you know, I could have been upset at having a $9.99 game last only five hours (less if we did not care about earning combos), but here I am talking about it and actively listening to the soundtrack because it is that good.  

And if you really need another reason, then the in-game infomercial, which was also the first released trailer for the game, is the perfect sales pitch:

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental

P.S.  I did a thing:

I only had to light just one of the 40 Mini Nukes.

At this point, the games fps really began to suffer.

I seem to recall a staticky noise followed by a flash of light and then a mass of coins and Tomorrow Stamps.