Ratings and Reviews by jakomo

The current eruption of the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii has led to lots of speculation that the goddess Pele is back and she's angry. But this game has taught me there is another form of Pele's Curse: if you take any local rocks away with you as souvenirs, bad luck will befall you. This scares the thieving tourists enough that many send the rocks back in the post: as a Hawaii tourist board employee, you need to drive around putting them back in their rightful places.

This is very much a postcard from Hawaii, both in size and style: an excuse to implement a "what I did on my summer vacation" as a text adventure. Not that there's anything wrong with that. "Bolivia By Night" is another really good example of that kind of thing. There is not much to do, puzzles aren't really difficult, and it's short, but well-written throughout.

A return to the weird world of Castle Balderstone. Specifically, the "weird west" world, in this cowboy horror where the protagonist packs heat to take on a demonic invasion of a frontier town. It's a shoot-em-up with trivial levels of puzzle difficulty: the only real challenge is equipping the right gun for the right enemy (and maybe preserving ammo, but it almost grows on trees in this game). But this is story-focused IF, and the most important element, the writing, easily carries this to greatness: you can almost taste the sawdust and spittoons. And there are multiple, impressively lengthy bits done entirely in rhyming verse. Yee-haw!

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.

Well-written prelude to a new official Lone Wolf trilogy, the first ever written by someone other than Joe Dever. You have to keep track of the gamebook elements by yourself (it tells you when to add/remove inventory items, notes, and endurance points on your action chart, and provides a dice rolling button), which initially feels strange for a digital game, but makes sense given the physical gamebook series this Twine is promoting.

Set well before the events of the classic series, you play a female initiate of a holy order sent on a dangerous investigation into the vanishing of a family of merchants. It's filled with branching choices, providing plenty of replayability, and packs in a lot of intriguing worldbuilding in its relatively short play-time. My character limped to the finish with a barely any endurance points left: a sign of a well-balanced gamebook, generating drama and tension through both narrative and mechanics. Some nice background music and simple but evocative images round out an enjoyable package.