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Creepy card game Arsonate is a very short race to be the last person burningSmoker face
Smoker face
Image credit:Nash
Image credit:Nash
2024’s small but growing avalanche of games thattrap you in a room with a nasty little freakcontinues withArsonate, in which the nasty little freak wears a gasmask and wants to set you on fire. He wants to do this using cards. There are 47 of them - a forest of silhouettes, laid across the blood-stained table between you. Every turn, you flip a tree card to reveal a flame. When the flames spread to a player’s Tower card, it’s game over.
The trouble is, you can only flip cards on your half of the board, with the conflagration beginning in the middle. So “set you on fire” is wrong, actually: the gist of Arsonate is to carefully sculpt a mutually threatening blaze so that you get incineratedlast. Integral to this are fire cards that trigger events. These range from giving you an extra turn – typically, not very welcome – to awarding you a random utility you can use to twist the odds.
Each game of Arsonate should take under 30 minutes, and there are three possible endings. It’s all obviously reminiscent ofBuckshot Roulette, a named influenceon the Itch.io page, and less obviously of Inscryption, though I’m not sure the demo is as gripping as either. Arsonate’s Host doesn’t have the abject animatronic wrongness of Buckshot’s dealer, and the card game isn’t as viscous with flourishes and variables asInscryption’s equivalent. Still, itisa demo, and it’s getting there.
Why do we like video games that trap us inside with a nasty little freak? I wonder if it’s down to the suspicion that most video game developers are nasty little freaks. “Entertainers”, my eye - video game developers are Cartesian demons who immerse us in predatory stagecraft and perform mean tricks on us from behind the veil of code. In games such as this, you can at least savour the pretence of confronting the sadistic fucker and, if you play your fireaxes right, cooking their goose.
Arsonate is also onSteam- there’s no release date yet. Question for the thread: favourite fire system in a game? I’ll see your oh-so-predictableFar Cry 2 shoutoutand raise you oneTenderfoot Tactics.
