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...