Little Inferno

Little Inferno is a tiny, intentionally hypnotic toy from Tomorrow Corporation, the small studio formed by veterans of World of Goo and Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. The entire game takes place in front of a single fireplace. You buy objects from a catalogue, throw them in the fire, and watch what happens — flaming logs, screaming robots, credit cards, batteries, exploding fish, unstable nuclear devices, tiny galaxies — and the proceeds from each burn fund the next round of purchases.

Underneath the surface joke about consumer culture is a quietly unsettling story about looking up out of the chimney and noticing that something is wrong with the world on the other side of the wall. The play is structured around discovering combinations — burn two specific items together to complete a combo and earn coins and stamps — and progress comes from steadily unlocking larger and more absurd catalogues, while the wider narrative slips in through letters and increasingly strange neighbourly correspondence.

The project is openly small and self-aware about it. Three developers, no publisher, no funding, no IAP, no upselling, no ads. The game runs as long as it needs to and stops, and the studio's stance on its own work is that it's short, polished and complete by design rather than an unfinished service product. Over a million people have bought it; the punchline of what they're doing while they play is part of the design.