Recent reviews by Varsoon

In a world where gender and sexuality are strongly tied to magical forces, the greatest Witch of the era is retiring. You play as her aspiring pupil and, as fate would have it, the Chaos Witch was waiting for this exact moment to attempt taking over the world and plunging it into, well, chaos. Lucky for you, though, your Witch mentor is able to impart unto you the typically-forbidden magicks of gender flipping, allowing you to overcome any other practitioner of the sexually magical arts.

Flip Witch is a side-scrolling lewd dungeon platformer. The primary mechanic of the game is your ability to change between male and female forms with the press of a button. Several attacks and traps will only affect males or females, so gameplay takes a note out of Mighty Switch Force and Ikaruga's respective bags. While I found myself wanting more of Flip Witch to integrate this mechanic, I appreciate the restraint as the gimmick gets old pretty quick in those aforementioned games. There were a few moments of confusion--like color variants of enemies not really mattering. While I would have liked every single enemy to play into the gender mechanic more, it's nice that it isn't something you constantly have to be thinking about. Of course, swapping genders allows for a wider variety of sexual scenes to be depicted, though, again, I find myself wanting for an even more ambitious game where the player could use that swap mid-scene to change any sex scene.

In an effort to enjoy some 'popcorn gaming' of something simple and easy that I could hop into, play a little, and put down, I have miserably failed with Flip Witch. I beat this whole game in one sitting. The extrinsic reward of porn is simply too powerful--in a good example, there are a number of hidden rooms or challenging platforming experiences that reward singular special coins, which can be used on various gachapon machines in town to unlock bespoke high quality loops of a sex animation depicting any of the various women in the game. Normally, I wouldn't give a damn about the collection chore in many games but with Flip Witch there was a well established reward that tugged on both sexual motivators as well as plain curiosity. Some of the game's best animations are secreted away in these rewards, so it felt an apt and appropriate payout for deeper engagement with the gameplay. This is the ideal for a good lewd game.

Engagement with the game's various NPCs tasks you with more thorough exploration of the game's areas, pushing for game engagement and rewarding with galleries of well animated sex scenes for those specific characters. I really wish that other games in the genre would take note, as NPCs in many games don't give much to latch onto. Here, though, an expectation of a unique sex scene is quickly established and that drives both motivation and connection to that character. I found myself readily returning to and exploring male and female dialogue variants with the characters I liked most and, more than once, was rewarded with further questing for it. Yet again, the pornography part of the game is driving engagement with its narrative and gameplay factors.

There are a few misses here and there in the sexual content--quality is typically high but a few scenes feel just shy of the mark the rest of the game hits. It is unfortunate that there aren't scenes with many of the well-designed bosses of the game, as some of its most imaginative and sensual design work can be found in those encounters. It's unusual--most lewd games make an attempt to feature sexual interactions between the player and every enemy, with bosses serving as the highest quality features--Flip Witch instead focuses first on gameplay engagement with its enemies and bosses and trends towards rewarding quests with sexual scenes of its NPCs instead. I found myself appreciating that there was more of a divorce between the explicitly sexual scenes and the platforming combat scenes as it meant I could more readily focus on the one or the other and not have to constantly be switching modes of engagement. You never have to compromise the play of one mode for the pursuit of the other; I probably speak for most players in voicing that it's obnoxious when pornographic content in these games is gated behind losing to every single enemy or boss. Perhaps that was more of the intent--to let the sensual and nude bodies of its enemies and bosses work up an undercurrent of sexual tension that then could be sought to release with the completion of those various quests. Either way, it's not too much to ask for scenes depicting sexual encounters with the hot bosses, you know?

As with all games that seek to leverage sex as a factor pushing gameplay, I do wish there were a bit more of pull between the elements at hand. Compelling stories can be told when the player has to choose between motivators of winning the game versus pursuit of sexual gratification. While many games get this wrong in making the sex scenes play out as failure conditions, it could have been interesting to have the Chaos Witch (or, really, all of the bosses) propose sexual favors in return for the player's allegiance. There's already a good amount of this present in how optional questlines reward optional sex scenes, though I find the most captivating experiences in these games to be less the 'collect all of the gallery' moments and far more the 'make a difficult decision when the motivators at hand are actually felt' parts. While Flip Witch certainly isn't going to deliver on my proposed 'Undertale of Lewd Games' concept, it's absolutely a step in the right direction as it treats its sexual scenes with at least a modicum of in-universe consistency while leveraging them to drive a level of engagement that the game simply wouldn't have otherwise. Flip Witch is a better game for having sex in it and the sexual scenes are more erotically rewarding for having a narrative and game built around earning them. This should be the standard for any lewd game and it's a shame that it's not, as integrating sex into a game has such potential to drive extrinsic motivators in players in a way that little else can.

I did find the whole experience wearing a bit thin in the latter half of the game--health ups and heals and other powerups allowed for me to just facetank every boss after a certain period of time despite some clever design work being done to push for more engaged encounters. The 10 hour playtime, though, made this not so egregious an issue--I unironically enjoyed this far more than Hollow Knight, which has all the rough edges and nary a titty to be seen.

It's rare to see a turn based RPG that's doing something new.
It's even rarer to find one that's this good.
Deathbulge : Battle of the Bands is one of the best RPGs I've played.

The jokes are on point and have gotten some really unexpected laughs. It's not just dialogue, either. There's a plethora of visual gags from absurd walk cycles to every new encounter providing a fascinating character or enemy design to chuckle over. The game manages an easy tempo thanks to this, rarely falling into the pitfall of boring RPG dialogue or long segments of one-note gameplay.

The music is phenomenal. Play this game with headphones on. There was more than one part of the game where I just had to stop playing and enjoy to the music for a bit before resuming. Obviously, huge boss battles are perfect places for some expected jams, but they didn't skimp out on the background music for dungeons, either. There's been more than one time, too, when an unexpected bit of music flares in or a certain motif becomes apparent in a song and it really elevates the game. Of course, thematically, music makes for an excellent match with all things RPG: different genres of music help to differentiate and communicate what classes do; you learn new 'beats' that you can add to your arsenal; your team is your band; your band is a part of a demonically-slanted battle of the bands from which you need to find some escape or you will all die. It just fits.

The actual plot ends up more engaging and sincere than expected. When writing a game with as much comedy as this, with its namesake being a joke-focused webcomic, it's easy to expect this to just be goofy nonsense all the way down. By the end of the game, though, I was really endeared to the main cast of characters and the connections they made to others along the way. I loved how even side characters all had their own little plots with dialogue for nearly every character in the game updating as the major events played out. The world felt realized and whole despite being the romp that it is. There are some really heartfelt moments in here and the fact that Deathbulge doesn't shy away from being sincere with its absolutely absurd world makes for some memorable plot beats. Just like the music, there was more than one time where I had to just sit back and exclaim, "Man, this game whips ass."

And that's all before even getting into the systems in the game! Typically, RPGs will either be most engaging in combat's turn-to-turn decisions or they'll put all the engagement in your party-building out of combat with combat itself being the execution of what you've built. While Deathbulge trends towards the latter of those styles, there's still a lot to chew on when you're actually in a fight. From actively swapping who is taking a hit to buff and debuff management, combat has a nice ebb and flow that varies heavily based on what mix of enemies you are up against. Encounters aren't over in just two or three hits but they also don't ever overstay their welcome. The 'random' encounters often showcase approachable snippets of what the area boss' arsenal is going to be like all while awarding new attacks for you to make use of, making working your way through a dungeon a more pleasant experience than the usual bash-and-thrash that the genre is known for. There's a very smart limitation placed in that your characters only get three special moves of your choosing, which really pushes the player towards experimenting with different build combinations. This might strike as a bit much to chew on but, like any good RPG, all of these mechanics are rolled out with a fitting pacing. The moment you've got a handle on two characters, the game gives you a third. Right when you feel like you've flexed the best builds you can land on, the game opens up some new class options and a second accessory slot. In the same way that I found myself playing to get to the next joke or plot beat, I kept wanting to play to get more abilities and progress in its systems, too.

I got about 30 hours out of the game on my first playthrough, though I imagine most players would land around 20 hours. For the asking price, that's a steal. For a game made by a team this small, this really is a gem. Easy recommend.

Blade goes Mroph
Very good

Inscryption could've been a great game. It isn't.
There are two major issues with Inscryption that make it hard to recommend :
1. Everything about the game (the marketing, demo, etc.) is not reflective of the majority of the game experience.
2. The game's is at-odds with itself in the sort of narrative that it wants to present.
All of this is due to a central conceit that the game is built around--one third into Inscryption, the narrative, aesthetic, and gameplay all change in major ways. There are games that do pull this sort of thing off--the Evoland series immediately comes to mind, but others like Brutal Legend, Actraiser, Wonderful 101, and Frog Fractions all pull off big genre shifts while still being generally good games. Inscryption does not.

The problem hugely lies in the first third of Inscryption just being much better and more compelling than the rest of the game. There's this big promise of escaping the cabin you're trapped in, creating an alluring game-within-a-game. There are interesting card mechanics that meaningfully build upon themselves. There's a dark vibe to all of it. When things finally start to come to a climax, literally all of that gets thrown out. The only connective tissue ends up being card games, a meta-narrative, and some recurrent characters. Keep in mind--none of this is what the game advertises itself as.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was handled with finesse. The player could have been given more agency over this genre shift. It could have introduced its new mechanics with the same compelling tact that the first section of the game had. As it stands, everything just gets thrown at you and the only motivating force you're really given to latch onto--through this game that is both mechanically and visually less compelling--is to try to figure out what is actually going on. Maybe this big change is worth it? Maybe this all being such a huge secret serves a really fantastic narrative purpose?

It doesn't. The second act comes and goes and gives away the whole of the plot as if it has blown its narrative load and is just ready to go to bed. Gone is any of the intrigue or subtlety of the first act. Welcome the characters just telling you the nature of the world and the game itself, along with a whole live-action footage vignette narrative that tries really hard to do something and fails pretty miserably at it. You really get the sense that Inscryption wants to be this very meta-textual game that has a creepy-pasta style bent to it, but it was already accomplishing that so well with the first act that when all the rest comes it starts to feel like a parody of itself.

Then it gets worse. The third act rolls around and throws out all of your progression so far in the game. For the second time. At this point, it's hard to even care. The charisma is purposefully drained out of the game as you replay a recreation of the first act, except if it sucked. I'm not even joking or slamming the game here, this is literally the narrative and design functionality of the final act. To make matters worse, it also features the weakest game design of any of the three acts, further stripping the player of a sense of meaningful agency in how they construct their deck. Even the non-card-game elements are phoned in at this point, with even the antagonist dealer you are playing against feeling like he could care less. Nothing feels like a meaningful culmination of the previous two acts here. Even the card game lacks the sense of building towards anything more.

Then the game just sort of ends. There is no grand puzzle that you, the player, has solved. Your victory is empty--and not in
a narratively satisfying way, either. While the ending sequence feels appropriately novel, the found-footage elements of the game fail to gel together in any sort of meaningful way. It's all a mess and for no real meaningful reason.

The biggest issue ends up being that there were moments of real promise and intrigue throughout. A better game designer could have designed a more cohesive game where the player solves both an evolving card-game and a series of meta-puzzles to thwart the whims of the game itself. A better writer could have penned a plot that kept players compelled the whole way through by actually delivering on the intrigue of the first act while keeping up enough of a mystery. A better actor could have really sold the live action footage moments with appropriately unsettling reactions and interactions. That's all really what bothers me the most about Inscryption--it advertises itself as a better game than what it is and puts all of its stock towards a big significant twist driving the game forward but everything after that twist falls short of what you've already played.

The developer knows it, too. They've released a patch to make the first part of the game 'endless'--why not the second or third parts? We all know why. Those parts suck. The problem is that the game isn't just the first act. The problem is that so much of the excitement of the first act is building mysteries that never see a satisfying payoff in the rest of the game. The problem is that the game swings for the fences with a big meta-narrative about it being a video game and then fails to really do anything amazing with that conceit. My whole point in writing this review is to vent my frustration over a game that had a lot of promise doing seemingly all it could to flush that promise away. It's more annoying than playing a game that is just outright bad. That's the most tragic part of all of this--while many people will rightfully say the full game should have been just more of the first act or that the game is bad for advertising itself as just being that first act content which runs suspiciously just long enough to be outside of the window of Steam's refund policy on time played, the real problem is that the conceit could've been great. So much could've been done to really make that twist and those other acts work. Inscryption could have been great. It isn't. It's even worse than bad; it's disappointing.

I love rhythm games. I've played everything from Gitaroo Man to Rock Band to Project Diva.
I'm not amazing at rhythm games. There aren't many that I'm able to consistently do well on the highest difficulties of, but I can make it through all of them without much issue.
I love RPGs, from Final Fantasy to Baldur's Gate.
I like to think I'm pretty good at those.

Before I go on, I should probably speak towards my short time playing this game on Steam:
The controller support was finicky and so I purchased the game a second time on PS4. I should note that it's become more and more apparent as I've played higher difficulty songs that the note tracks are designed with PC in mind and are much, much harder to handle on a dpad controller. In an ironic turn of fate, Metronomicon has the same issue many Japanese rhythm games have; higher difficulties are nigh-impossible without using the intended hardware, be it arcade stick or keyboard, as the porting to use of a controller was an afterthought. Regardless, I've since played through the game on PS4 with a Dualshock 4 controller and, while I enjoyed my time with it, I find it unlikely many other people will unless they share my patience bordering on masochistic tenacity.

Metronomicon tries to be both an RPG and a Rhythm game. Marrying these genres proves to be a shaky union and because of that, it's very hard for me to recommend this game to anyone else. What's exactly at odds here?

On the RPG side, there's a general non-specificity when it comes to just about everything in the game. How big of a difference is minor damage from major and major from crazy? How long should I expect these buffs to last? How significant of a difference does it make to overcharge abilities by inputting more notes before executing them? While you're constantly asking yourself questions like this, you're treated to randomly gathered items and it's unclear if loot is tied to specific stages or enemies or bosses and, some times, it's even unclear exactly what that loot does. The combination lifepools into a team health pool works well until you start questioning exactly how healing, percent health triggers, and other effects relate to it all. Ultimately, Metronomicon makes the mistake of giving the player too little information, which, in turn, makes it hard to feel as though you're properly interacting with the systems that are in place. The systems to progress and upgrade your team feel largely outside your agency as a player and 'grinding' songs for experience is a process that doesn't feel all that great and it's unclear how hard difficulty scales to your party levels and what they even do beyond netting you new moves.

At the end of the day, though, the rhythm stuff holds it back--did you want to execute that move of yours? Hope you can hit those notes right. Were you hoping for more direct control of your party? Good luck, you're bound to the frets. Did you want to pause to take in more information and inform your next decision? Too bad; that resets the song track entirely, making you waste precious seconds of the song run time. You'll constantly find yourself unable to make decisions that feel informed because the game is forever ticking down the amount of time left on the song you've got, notes forever whizzing by as a reminder you should, optimally, always be slapping in inputs. Remember--your goal is not to actually beat any bosses; it's just to survive to the end of the song. Metronomicon constantly reminds you that it's a rhythm game first and foremost.

But what about the rhythm game? Honestly, the RPG stuff holds it back. In any other rhythm game, the note sequences would feel absolutely tailored to the songs, but here they're variable based on the character you're using (arbitrarily so, it seems?). Do you like feeling like you're 'in the zone' when playing a rhythm game? Enjoy constantly having to pull out to play this left-brain right-brain exercise of swapping between characters to heal, buff, cleanse debuffs, and deal damage. Were you a fan of being able to focus on the notes in a rhythm game? Metronomicon makes sure all the relevant information you need is at your periphery no matter what--enemy health and type is on the far right while your team health is far left while buffs active are in tiny icons beneath characters while individual character health is something apparently only I care about. This gets to some of the worst offenders, though--debuffs and boss effects. Some debuffs are laughably minimal, such as your icons losing color, whereas others, like the one that waves them around such that it's very difficult to tell if a note is a double note or two notes close together, is a much more frustrating beast. Bosses will mess with your notes as well in ways that aren't always properly telegraphed as even being boss moves; it took me several attempts to realize that the second boss was actually using a move that caused these boulders to fall down, obscure my notes, and hurt my characters and that I had to switch characters to avoid that damage, throwing a huge wrench in the whole 'playing a rhythm game' aspect of things. Sometimes, a boss will use a move that forces you to hit notes or take damage for several seconds, which, in turn, wastes your own time that you need to use to deal damage, which can cost you the fight. It'd be fine if the boss fights were designed around this, but it feels wholly up to RNG when these moves get used. Regardless, you'll constantly find yourself interrupting the flow of rhythm-based play to consider some element of the RPG based play and it's not a great time. Speaking of, missing notes doesn't just interrupt or stop your momentum towards taking an action--it also hurts your party. Fumbling a set of notes can be far more damaging than enemy attacks. If that's not enough, the characters groan and pout every time it happens and there's no option, as far as I can find, that turns this off. Speaking of distractions, various characters will appear and start dancing on screen at random times and this can obscure your characters in a way that's so distracting on top of everything else that it's hard to keep focus on the rhythm game at hand. It's a mess. Left and right note differentiation is fine, but up and down still give me issue even at the end of the game--which wouldn't be as much a problem if hitting the wrong note didn't interrupt my attack or cause me to use the entirely wrong one. Several combo notes require you to suddenly rely on a second set of inputs (wasd if you're using a keyboard, face buttons on a controller) and this strikes me as a strange design decision and something that works far better on the dualshock than it does a keyboard or XBOX controller. Song difficulty varies so wildly that some songs within the same chapter are harder to beat than their boss counterparts. The song list varies from forgettable to a few real bangers and it's a shame more time wasn't spent polishing this end of the game.

While I could gripe on about elements of the art, aesthetic, animation, and plot, those are all minor points to what I've outlined so far. Metronomicon is a flawed game. There's nothing else quite like it, and if you're like me, you'll play and enjoy it despite the flaws, shortcomings, and frustrations, but for the general person looking to pick up a game? Maybe the adventure you're looking for is at a different dance hall.

TL;DR:
Hand of Fate is two repetitive, hardly innovative, unfortunately vague, sometimes-working games stuck together in a way that's at least pretty. Don't buy it without doing your homework.

FULL REVIEW:
Hand of Fate boasts an aesthetically gripping melding of two unlike games into a single experience that varies from unplayable to underwhelming. On their own, each of the ‘games’ of Hand of Fate fall far from being worthwhile. Together, the card game and the three-dimensional fighting game intermingle in a way that works just enough to keep players invested in a fairly transparent skinner box.

Players are subjected to a deck-building card game that rewards repetitive play with a larger card base and challenges players through proper resource management. Game-to-game rewards are meted out through a shell game that is either too easy or too hard, an aspect that belies the RNG nature of the card game. Overarching rewards are given after successfully completing ‘token’ cards, which have a variety of conditions to complete (some of which are obvious, some obscure, almost all of them lacking explanation). Common issues of RNG exist and are easy to overlook, but there are some more severe instances such as stumbling upon very difficult encounters too early on that force a player have to quit a run of the game or even completely reset their progression overall. Card balance is a huge issue, with several cards being outright stronger than others regardless of situation. Furthermore, the encounter deck that the player must create is a vague collection—there are no indicators of what the encounters do, and some encounters seem variable in their options and outcomes. This makes constructing an encounter deck a chore of either looking up each card online or simply not knowing what each encounter brings in terms of challenge and reward unless the player has drawn that encounter several times. Hand of Fate seems to beckon players to experiment to discover what works and what doesn’t, while punishing players every time that it does not work out both in their current game played and across multiple future games.

The fighting game, unfortunately, has even more severe issues. Combat is without weight, several mechanics of the system go unexplained, difficulty of encounters has to be inferred, some arenas are far too unforgiving, and so on. There is a simple system of click-to-attack, click-to-counter incoming moves that’s been popularly attributed to the Arkham series of games. Here, it barely works, as most encounters find the player vastly outnumbered by enemies that constantly attack. It is often difficult to even land two attacks in a row on an enemy without being interrupted in some way, giving combat a hectic and choppy flow. Camera angles can be a detriment to properly positioning the character, especially as some arenas feature traps and enemies can attack the player from off-screen. There’s a rolling maneuver that the player is intended to use to avoid several of the heavier attacks in the game, but the roll often comes out too late and does not offer much in terms of defense thanks to aforementioned issues along with painfully awkward hitboxes. Enemies take far too many hits, with the exception of when the player has specifically itemized to defeat an enemy type, and then combat becomes laughably easy against said enemies. There simply is no middle-ground, though. To further frustrate things, rewards are tied to number of monster cards drawn rather than individual monster difficulty--sometimes beating four skeletons can be just as fruitful as overcoming ten skeletons and a boss you fought before. Overall, combat is a mess, ranging from repetitive and easy to punishingly difficult thanks to a culmination of issues that are out of the player’s hands.

Throughout the whole of the game, there simply is a lack of clarity—how much damage am I actually doing? How much damage does my gear reduce? What does an ice-cone attack even do? Is holy damage only extra-effective against undead? Who are these various characters? What does this encounter card even do? What is the purpose? Too many aspects are left to be inferred, both in terms of narrative and mechanics (an appendix would help, even). Oft-times, I find myself recursively fighting through boring encounters, hoping that I actually win the shell games this time around, so that I can unlock more shell games and progress to just being done. There isn’t a gripping narrative arc that makes me want to continue to play to the end. The gameplay from moment to moment is droll and forgettable. There’s nothing that stands out.

This all goes without mentioning the several issues the game has just running. It outright crashes on startup, it crashes when loading some encounters, it sees framerate dips on some machines; so on and so forth. Thankfully, the support team for the game has been working on patching out and addressing these issues, mostly via their forums.
This isn’t to say it’s all bad. I’d be kidding myself if I said the style of the game and the goals it sets out for aren’t awesome. There’s a very strong aesthetic that permeates the game just as there’s something refreshing about having these two genres put together in such a way that one doesn’t get too boring before the other takes over. Sure, dialogue gets repetitive and lore is a bit sparse at times and obfuscated at times, but it’s charming and interesting when it isn’t.

All in all, Hand of Fate is promising, but lacks polish. There are plenty of options that can be fixed, plenty that can be clarified, and several aspects that can be advanced. Sadly, it seems that a complete overhaul would need to be done to each of the games that exist within Hand of Fate for them to work on their own. If you’d like to pick up two flawed, repetitive games that can distract from their flaws and repetition by means of alternation, go for it. If you’re a sucker for how a game looks rather than how it plays, buy the game like I did. If you want a worthwhile playing experience that’s rewarding outside of just earning more stuff in the game, though? Look to spend your money elsewhere.

If ever there was a game that flaunted its squandered potential, it is Transistor. What exists in Transistor is a duality of very captivating plot and brilliant-fun game design alongside dully written paragraphs of texts and tedious groan-worthy moments of play. Conceptually, Transistor presents a lore rich world with gameplay options that are variable enough to suit the player's desires and offer a huge variety of play. In practice, Transistor's plot is delivered to the player in a scattershot and confusing fashion, with text logs providing most of the lore and significant interactions of the game. In play, Transistor's multi-faceted system becomes either exploit-a-strategy to win or get destroyed. Environments that the game tells us are really interesting end up feeling more like arenas for the next fight, and the entire game gets wrapped up in moving from arena to arena, hoping the plot will become more accessible by the next big fight. The beautiful art direction and captivating soundtrack offer just that more of the tease of what Transistor could have been. For its low price, it's certainly worth enjoying what Transistor is--a touching, sometimes-confusing romp through a cyberpunk strategy combat world.

Bastion is a sturdy example of executing a gimmick well within a game. Even without the endearing narration that accompanies most of the game, Bastion is still an action-packed brawler with a colorful world, dozens of substantial and neat gameplay options, and a touching story accompanied by a fitting soundtrack. That's not to say it's without its faults--the game can become repetitive if you don't keep switching your loadout up, there are moments where repetitive moments drag on, and using cardinal controls (up, down, left, and right) for a game that features stages the head in intermediate directions is an absolute headache at times. Regardless, Bastion stands out as a stellar and unique gameplay experience that's fun in both play and plot.

If you'd like to spend a handful of hours playing a clumsy platformer with dull graphics, boot up Thomas Was Alone. Like most 'games' that can't quite pull of the 'game' portion of their existence, Thomas Was Alone attempts to make up for all of that by telling a story with its game, shifting weight onto that story to apologize for why the game itself is lacking. With pretension seeping from its pores, this game seeks to imprint itself as a narrative of overcoming boundaries and working as a team. While cute in its execution, it is just that--a baby's first steps, which become a dull affair after hours of watching the child fall. If you've got an afternoon to blow on what plays and feels like a college student's senior project in game design, go for it. Otherwise, this game ranks medium--it can't be called rare and it certainly isn't well done.

Little Inferno's actual gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, which is why it isn't a game most players will be returning to. With its short completion time, the game itself serves as a vehicle for its overarching message. Unfortunately, the game relies too heavily on its one-note atmosphere and handles its theme in a heavy-handy manner that ultimately insults its player--both literally and intellectually. The 'point' is hammered so obnoxiously and self-righteously, that the masochism that is playing Little Inferno attributes any negativity towards the game as being a part of its design. Unless you'd like a lesson in what a masturbatory game looks like, take a rain check on Little Inferno.