It’s been almost exactly ten years since Little Inferno released and now it’s getting an expansion. Little Inferno: Ho Ho Holiday is a Christmas-themed DLC which adds a new story and 20 new items to throw in your fireplace. It will launch on November 18th, but there’s a reveal trailer below.
Little Inferno was a game about burning things. You’d unlock new items, you’d throw them in your fireplace to set them alight, and you’d try to incinerate them alongside other items to discover combos. It was more of a toy than a game, and it was wrapped in a beat-you-over-the-head satire of capitalism and video game monetisation. I didn’t like it very much and neither did Jim in our Little Inferno review.
Little Inferno is one of those little oddities of design that I am so pleased to uncover and examine, but will no doubt forget about within just a few weeks. It’s a burning fragment on the pile of gaming by-products marked “esoteric ephemera”. That’s not say there’s no value in that, just that the kind of reward we might have expected from a team whose previous credits include World Of Goo and Henry Hatsworth is strangely lacking. I don’t think you will care if you miss out on it, and I doubt anyone will be warming their toes with it this Christmas.
Other people liked it a lot, however, and a Christmas-themed expansion is a fine opportunity to warm your toes with it this Christmas. The Ho Ho Holiday Steam page adds that it also includes a new character, 50 new combinations in which to burn things, and an Infinite Yule Log. “Start a fire and leave it burning for cozy ambiance.”
It’s a shame we never got an expansion to Kyle Gabler’s older game, World Of Goo, made with Ron Carmel, which I think is as good as Portal. It’s a terrible crime you forgot to vote for it in the RPS Reader’s 100.