Off the Grid:
By Zachary Brictson
36
One of the first ‘toys’ I could throw into my Little Inferno fire place was a credit card, an unsettling notion that didn’t exactly instill confidence in my purchase of Tomorrow Corporation’s latest title. Touching the plastic to the heat quickly swallowed it in flames, spewing coins to spend on more toys. It’s pointless, but what’s both cruel and interesting about Little Inferno is that it knows its pointless, and yes, perhaps even a waste of money. Little Inferno would have you believe it’s entirely without objectives, as your quirky neighbor Sugar Plumps reminds you in her letters describing the game’s aimlessness. In actuality though, it’s about matching, burning clever combinations of toys to meet a certain quota before advancing to new catalogs to order from. Descriptions of
possible matches, like ‘Spring Time’, can be challenging, but in this case, simply hinting at the pairing of an alarm clock and flower. Once you get several catalogs deep, memory begins to play a key role as matches span across both the old and new. Protein supplements, galaxies, nuclear bombs and opera singers, there’s a lot of bizarre stuff to throw in the fire and to keep track of for when new matches are unlocked. For example, to achieve the ‘Online Piracy’ match, you’ll need to remember the toy pirate from the first catalog and pair it with the internet cloud you can purchase in the fifth. That sort of contemporary reference and charm is frequent in Little Inferno. There’s even several pertaining to other popular indie titles like a cardboard