The petite but growing avalanche of games from 2024 where you’re trapped in a room with a nasty little monster continues with Arsonate, where a nasty little monster wears a gas mask and wants to set you on fire. He wants to do it with cards. There are 47 of them, a forest of silhouettes laid out on a bloody table between you. Each turn, you flip a tree card to reveal a flame. When the flames spread to a player’s Tower card, the game ends.
The problem is that you can only flip cards on your half of the board, and the fire starts in the middle. So “set you on fire” is actually a misnomer: the point of Arsonate is to carefully carve out a mutually threatening fire so that you get burned last. Fire cards are an integral part of this, triggering events. They range from giving you an extra turn – usually a less than welcome one – to granting you random utility that you can operate to change the odds.
Tools emerge from a strange little cargo crane on the left side of the table, and must be secured in a cabinet before they can be used. These include fire extinguishers, which let you flip over a fire card, spyglasses, which let you look under a tree card, and crowbars, which let you steal a tool from one of your opponent’s cabinets. Don’t worry, he’ll happily do the same to you: on Normal difficulty, the game tells you outright that your enemy loves to cheat. Tools are executed with a pleasing literalness: I’ve yet to win a real-life card game by placing a fire axe into a table, but I’m eager to try it in my next round of Cosmic Encounters.
Each Arsonate game should last less than 30 minutes, and there are three possible endings. All of this is clearly reminiscent of Buckshot Roulette, named after the influence on Itch.ioand the less obvious Inscryption, though I’m not sure the demo is as engaging. Arsonate’s host lacks the same animatronic wickedness of Buckshot’s dealer, and the card game isn’t as sticky with flourishes and variables as its Inscryption counterpart. Still, Is demo and we are already on the right track.
Why do we like video games that lock us inside with a nasty little freak? I wonder if it’s not because we suspect that most video game creators are nasty little freaks. The “artists,” in my opinion, video game creators are Cartesian demons who immerse us in predatory mise-en-scène and perform vile tricks on us from behind a veil of code. In games like this, you can at least enjoy the pretense of confronting a sadistic bastard and, if you play your axes right, cook him a goose.
Arsonat is also on Couple – no release date yet. Thread question: favorite in-game fire system? I’ll check out your oh-so-predictable Far Cry 2 and raise you a Tenderfoot Tactics.
