Little Inferno is an entertaining little morsel of a game. It sustains its simplistic "gameplay"-- which mainly consists of adventure game inventory combinations--with a dark, almost morbid sense of humor, as the entire game has you buying toys just so you can immediately throw them in a fire, leaving room for you to purchase more toys. The social commentary isn't exactly subtle, but it's effective. The writing and the foreboding soundtrack elevate the game so even from the first toy you throw in the fire, you know the game is more ambitious than its mechanics suggest. Still, this may be to the games detriment, as it has you expecting dark twists from the start. By the time the game ended, the story seemed almost conventional after all of the foreshadowing leading up to the finale.

If you picked up this game as part of a Humble Bundle, I recommend actually playing through it to the end. It only takes a couple hours, and is entirely worth the time.

I just finished Bioshock Infinite, and you should have too.

I don't want to get too deep into it lest there be spoilers, but I'll say that the game has the music direction since Bastion and the best art direction since, well, Bioshock. The choice of setting the story in an early 20th century American Exceptionalism dystopia is really refreshing and makes me wonder how many other times and places in the planet's history are going underserved in modern media.

Also, any game that gets me to refresh my memory of the Boxer Rebellion and Wounded Knee (and not come off as pretentious in so doing) must be doing something right.

As someone who mainly plays point & click adventures and other low-stress games, it takes a lot for a highly skill-based game to rope me in. Super Hexagon is one such game. Like Terry Cavanagh's previous VVVVVV, this game combines a great soundtrack, retro (but unique) graphics, and simple, precise, and unforgiving gameplay.

While I've only beaten "hard" (the easiest setting), and survived a record 30 seconds on "harder" (and I'll probably never get past 5 seconds on the 4 even harder difficulties), it never frustrated me, mainly due to the soundtrack and the "zone" you can get in when you start to see the patterns in the chaos. For a couple bucks, this can't be beat. I look forward to whatever Cavanagh comes up with next.

While some people take the end of a year as an opportunity to reflect on how awesome and successful they are, I prefer to look back at all of the media I've consumed over the past year.

Without further ado, here's how I wasted my time: