Have You Played... Little Inferno?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Little Inferno [official site] is a game about burning things. It's also a game about games, a deconstruction of in-app purchases, and tap- and click-based repetition.

I thoroughly enjoyed Little Inferno. If there was a Black Mirror episode about the current (the game was released four years ago but its targets are still relevant) state of mobile gaming, it'd probably look a lot like this. Well, it'd probably look completely different because Little Inferno as Tomorrow Corporation's signature art style, cutely sinister, and it's nothing at all like what you'd expect from a Black Mirror episode – but this is the kind of satire that makes you think, “oh blimey, the people who made this really must hate games”.

That's not true, of course. Tomorrow Corporation have gone and released another game since Little Inferno, proving that they quite like the damn things, and members of the studio were behind the somewhat similar World of Goo.

In terms of playstyle, they're nothing alike, Inferno and Goo, but the twists and turns of their plots explore some of the same ideas. Inferno is creepier though, and funnier too for my money, and it's a shame that it loses some of its bite as it moves toward an ending.

You might find it preachy or a little too obvious to justify all of the work it makes you do to reach that ending, but I had a smile on my face as I turned away from the flames.