Reviews by jakomo

The Little Match Girl gets scary, with this Clark Ashton Smith inspired weird tale. Ebenezabeth takes on a time-travelling werewolf, teaming up with three other monster-hunters, in the closest thing to a "slasher film" this series has ever been. Builds a genuinely foreboding atmosphere very successfully (the descriptions of the creature's victims are especially creepy), while retaining the straightforward inventory-puzzle focused gameplay these games are known for. A nice new feature for this series is the in-built adaptive hint system: I only needed it once but love that it exists. There is also a "post-game" involving collecting a set of cards, which I have yet to fully explore...

The little match girl's mission is to retrieve a missing statue on orders from the pope himself. She is accompanied by a new character, Melix, who can jump through worlds by using mirrors. The quest takes the pair through plenty of unusual locations, in a highly linear fashion: there are very few diversions here, most rooms only have one entrance and one exit. It's like following a walking trail. Given the large, complex maps of the recent Little Match Girl 5, this linearity works fine as a palate-cleanser. The challenge involves looking out for fire or mirrors to warp to the next world, while negotiating the occasional puzzle: these feel like a step up in difficulty from recent LMG games, despite the minimal inventory and interactable objects. Actually, most of the puzzles occur on the way back, after finding your target, which is a very funny inversion of the usual "Hero's Journey" tropes.

Little Match Girls, assemble! This episode immediately subverts the LMG formula by putting you in the shoes of Linus, an NPC from previous games, who can jump between worlds by locking/unlocking doors. He's hunting five different versions of Ebenezabeth, to bring them together for a daring rescue mission foreshadowed in LMG4. The second part of the game gives you control over all five match girls, jumping between them at will, as they infiltrate a vampire's lair and use their unique skills in conjunction to save the day.

Big maps, lots of NPCs, action sequences, character switching, cut scenes, all contribute to the cinematic feeling of of Little Match Girl 5, but it's the story where this episode really excels: giving glimpses of vast world-building, then pulling back and making it all about Ebenezabeth and her immediate circle of friends and enemies, a story about people instead of just places or ideas. This trick is repeated multiple times, and culminates in possibly the biggest thing to happen to Ebenezabeth in the series so far.

Ebenezabeth decides battle strategy in a war between dino-riders, pteranodons and wellness instructors. Essentially, a single big logic puzzle as you place the most suitable units to repel/attack the enemy's units, then watch the fights play out. Didn't work out? Restart and try again. Ebenezabeth can explore the military encampment and its environs, chatting to NPCs etc to get a feel of the backstory to this conflict and the characters engulfed by it: this also provides useful strategic info. The puzzle itself is multi-dimensional, complex and interesting to solve. And once you've figured out how to not lose, you'll realize you then need to figure out how to (Spoiler - click to show) rout the opponent, and then how to draw a perfect stalemate to get the best ending, and a bonus puzzle. A deftly written and smartly implemented addition to the Little Match Girl canon.

Scientists have proven that by the year 2033, all interactive fiction will be Little Match Girl games. The eighth episode to date has Match Girl taking on a whole gang of bad guys, the "naughty girls" - some of whom are real historical figures. Takes place after LMG4, but mainly refers to events from LMG3. Gameplay revolves around finding and collecting "special verbs", then using them in the appropriate places to solve puzzles. Simple, straightforward, perfectly effective and highly entertaining as ever.

Almost like a "deleted scene" from LMG4, further expanding on the unexplained history between The Little Match Girl and the character "Linus", who was apologetic about a mystery event in the past. This episode fills in part of that continuity gap as LMG leaps between her attic and four locations (a cabin in the woods, a witch's cave, a future crypt-temple, and a metropolis in the grip of panic) in search of a leaf that can be used to create a curative elixir. She's accompanied by her crow, who becomes the playable character at one point. A welcome twist to the now tried & tested formula of this series. Ends with a straight-up general knowledge test question (easily cheatable).

The fourth numbered entry, and the sixth overall entry, in the distinguished series about the eponymous time-and-space-hopping assassin, formerly a tragic Hans Christian Andersen heroine. LMG4 drops the turn-based combat of its predecessor and returns to traditional puzzle-solving roots, while keeping the large, sprawling maps that need to be explored with pen-and-paper in hand (including prehistoric Montana, a far-future colony ship, an alpen castle and a frontier mining town).

No opening "mission briefing" this time round: you're dropped on a beach in Penzance with a picture of a lighthouse and told to get on with it. The game meanders at first before coalescing into a collect-the-pieces plot (pearls for the fairy prince's crown) but it's easy enough to grok that you need to explore every location you can: unlock doors, find light sources, shoot bad guys etc. There's plenty of optional content: I mistakenly thought a side quest about gathering signatures for a petition was actually the main objective, so was surprised when the quest-giver just gave a curt "ok thanks" type response and nothing else happened.

As expected of this series: great writing and well-balanced old-school gameplay (I only used the built-in hints once). But it's also the first entry that doesn't quite feel complete (there's a lot of setup for LMG5 that doesn't pay off in this entry) and the first entry where I felt it was content to rest on its laurels: there's no really innovative new stuff here that hasn't been seen previously. But the series already sets a very high quality bar, so it remains must-play stuff even while coasting.

The Little Match Girl: Wordle Edition. No fetch quests this time, just variations on the en vogue Hangman-meets-Mastermind word games. The most linear game in the series by far, but with all the elegant writing and succinct, effortless worldbuilding you come to expect from this author.

Each Little Match Girl game has been getting more and more elaborate, so inevitably The Little Match Girl 3 is a giant, open-world non-linear RPG. Yes, RPG: your character has stats, can recruit party members and battles enemies in turn-based combat. Pretty daunting at first: you'll need to map, keep notes, it's tricky to win battles and potential companions seem very scarce. Luckily there are no negative results to losing a battle, it's easy to restore your HP and ammo, and once you get into the groove of picking the right fight, using a winning strategy, then levelling up to do it all over again, it settles into a nice flow. Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom vibes. There are a few traditional fetch-quest type puzzles too to break things up, but the main focus is on the combat, which has a lot of depth: my strategy involved using (Spoiler - click to show)the crow's "vex" and "shriek" to disable enemies, the match girl's "rapidfire" to do massive damage, and the mermaid's "heal" and "vortex" situationally. But there were lots of special abilties, stat-enhancing items and magic potions I never touched. There was even a whole other companion I never recruited. Every player will have their own unique way to win.

Light and fluffy when it wants to be, dark and moody when it needs to be, Veeder has an affinity for the JRPG Earthbound and, of all his work, this is the game that shows that influence the clearest.

A traditional sequel in the Hollywood style: everything people liked about the original but more and bigger. Locations are more expansive, puzzles are more complex (there's even a full-blown escape room in here), NPCs generally have more to say. As a result it does lose some of the elegance and simplicity that gave the original its charm. But it gains some great gags: the sea-captain's diary is an entertainingly absurd piece of Spike Milligan-esque nonsense-humour. The sudden appearance (and subsequent complete disappearance) of RPG combat is also worth a chuckle (but will turn out to be a major gameplay element of the next game). A nice wrinkle is that a lot of the puzzles are about creating the fire-source that you need to proceed. Straight-up (Spoiler - click to show)killing a guy may seem a bit out-of-character for the protagonist, but actually fits with the (Spoiler - click to show)implied violence of the first game's ending. As well as being a neat metaphor for letting go of the past and looking forward instead of clinging on to a mythical "golden age".

Structurally very similar to the first game: more fetch quests, more fun NPCs, more wildly imaginative locales to explore. This familiarity is likely a deliberate choice, designed to subvert the ending of LMG1. Where you previously (Spoiler - click to show)threatened violence to get what you want, this time round everything points to a similar resolution, but that doesn't fly and you need to find a more peaceful way, more in keeping with the protagonist's personality.

The "classic fairytale re-imagined" is one of the most heavily over-represented genres in IF, but when Ryan Veeder does it, you pay attention. You play the titular match girl, freezing to death on a street corner but able to teleport to different times/places/worlds by striking matches. Gamplay is super-straightforward fetch quests: find an object / find the right NPC to give it to, or find an NPC / figure out what object they would like. Superluminal Vagrant Twin-esque. It's elegant, clean and simple. Locations are varied and surprising. NPCs are deftly characterized and full of life, despite how little they actually say and do.