Creepy card game Arsonate is a very short race to be the last person burning

2024’s small but growing avalanche of games that trap you in a room with a nasty little freak continues with Arsonate, 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 incinerated last. 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.

Utilities emerge from a weird little dumbwaiter to left of the table, and must be secured in a locker before you can play them. They include fire extinguishers, which let you re-flip a fire card, spy-glasses, which let you peek beneath a tree card, and crowbars, which let you steal a utility from one of your opponent’s lockers. 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. Utilities are executed with pleasing literalness: I have yet to win any real-life cardgames by embedding a fireaxe in the table, but I’m keen to try it during my next round of Cosmic Encounters.

Each game of Arsonate should take under 30 minutes, and there are three possible endings. It’s all obviously reminiscent of Buckshot Roulette, a named influence on 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 as Inscryption’s equivalent. Still, it is a 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 on Steam – there’s no release date yet. Question for the thread: favourite fire system in a game? I’ll see your oh-so-predictable Far Cry 2 shoutout and raise you one Tenderfoot Tactics.