I entered the Tomorrow Corporation’s World of Goo on the word of Tom Bissell in this Grantland article on iPad games. I found it to be everything that Bissell said it was: “a more beautiful, involving, and enchanting puzzler” than anything Angry Birds could hope to be. I remember and now agree with another review that called Goo a strangely “moral” game. It’s the kind of game that seems simple (make constructs out of balls of goo) but subversively catches you in a web of significant narrative. Why? Because even though it’s all about goo balls, something bigger is at stake.
Which means that I have high hopes for TTC’s Little Inferno, a new iPad game that recently dropped in the iTunes store. This time around, the premise is even weirder: you buy different objects only to set them on fire in your house’s “little furnace.” The premise was strange enough that I almost didn’t purchase the game. But then I did, and I’ve been burning toys and knick-knacks ever since. And once again, a strange and subversive narrative has slowly taken over. I’ve made my way through most of the game at this point and have lost at least one character of significance and seen hints of some “meta-narrative” that could be a roundabout environmental message or could be a critique of gaming culture or a commentary on the difficulty of communication in a world of meaningless gadgets. For all I know, it will be “about” all of the above and also about nothing.
That’s one of the beauties of stories, I suppose. Good ones catch you off guard, draw you in with strange and subtle overtures until you realize something greater, something slightly and necessarily elusive. Like a tiny match that eventually sets imaginations ablaze.
Space Enough, and Time 