The Little Match Girl in the Court of Maal Dweb

The Little Match Girl series consists of games where a time-travelling assassin girl adopted by Ebenezer Scrooge enters various worlds through the means of looking at flames.

This game is creepier than most the others, in good ways. I enjoyed the thematic unity of this one.

I originally forgot about the flame thing and so I wandered the opening area for a while before finding anything. Then once I examined a flame, things took off.

I enjoyed the diversity of the worlds this time. The main story here is that an evil werewolf is travelling through time, attacking others, and each time period and place you visit has also been visited by the werewolf. Despite the variety of worlds, the after effects of fear and strange sickness are common. I found it especially creepy that in one world the characters slowly became stricken as I left and visited again later.

Overall, the game is very polished. I ran into the same couple of issues others did (hints assumed I had grabbed something from a room when I hadn't, since the thing I needed to examine in that room didn't stick out to me; and 'percipient' was spelled as 'perpicient', unless that was intentional) but I didn't have the vorple-breaking bugs some reported.

I think I liked the atmosphere and single-mindedness of this game over some of the more elaborate other Match Girl games. It reminds me of Marvel's Werewolf By Night, as both are smaller, darker, werewolf-themed entries in a series filled with grand spectacles, and both are uniquely charming in their overall series.

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 in the Court of Maal Dweb is a fairly long parser game in Inform 7, where you play as Ebenezabeth Scrooge, the Little Match Girl who can travel through time and space by looking at fire. In this episode of the LMG series, you are tasked to take down a big bad werewolf, called Imrath, who has been terrorising people through time and space. The game includes hints, and as far as I could tell, does not have a failure state.
This was also my entry into the series.

Though you are supposed to be teaming-up with three other characters, you end up doing not only most of the search and prep for the werewolf, but also take it down. The game itself is relatively simple: explore the Woods and the different worlds (through the flames/torches), try to find information about the werewolf and how to take it down, and help the people in those worlds along the way (some back-and-forth between world is necessary).

While I managed to get through most of the game without needing hints (I think I was lucky in the order I ended up visiting the different realms, it made sense which things I had to get to next), it was the final showdown that gave me the most troubles/confusion. Before (Spoiler - click to show)you can complete your preparations, you come face to face with Imrath and are forced into some sort of mental battle. It really made no sense as to why the violin was there or why I had to play it (my guess is that LGM's violin play is central/greatly mentioned in another game. Still, it *somehow???* takes Imrath down? While the other puzzles made some sense (though I did wish there would have been more use in the kit we get at the start), this one really broke my brain.

I did enjoy the post-game content, going back to the different worlds and (Spoiler - click to show)heal everyone again with the violin. After taking Imrath down, I figured why not, and just rolled with it. But was a bit bummed to not find the missing element required by Maal (did it ever exist?), or what's on the pole, or that Mattin didn't want to (Spoiler - click to show)read my fortune.

I was a bit apprehensive of the long playtime, especially compared to other Ectocomp entries, but it was pretty fun nonetheless. The different worlds are rich in details and implementation, and super varied. Seeing your companions (Spoiler - click to show)fall one by one to the cursed state, like some weird slasher movie where the ingenue(-ish) to save the day, made me snort. They must not have forgotten their plot armour :P