The Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament

The most SF-tilted Little Match Girl episode yet. Takes place largely on a spaceship about to destroy a planet-sized golden shell found in space. The bad guys, a team of bumbling comedic incompetents (a la Team Rocket from Pokémon), think God is hiding inside. Ebenezabeth has other ideas, so has infiltrated their ship to stop the countdown. She has some of her gear and abilities from previous games still present, so she can see in the dark, transform into a mouse, scan things, and of course, shoot her Colt Paterson. Looking into fire transports her to another place and time, both deliberately and accidentally, causing short excursions to the South Dakota wildfires, a coal-powered train, and more.

The real-time element is front and centre, with a big countdown clock at the top of the screen, and can net you a losing ending, but it's actually very generous. There's a lot of excellent flavour text that you will likely skip if you're rushing to the next objective, or you're a slow reader. The text message conversations between the bad guys are gold. Worth playing at least twice to take it all in. Another highly entertaining LMG adventure.

This game runs on a timer, although there is an option to download a non-timed gblorb. While I played it, I had to get called away three times for family business while the timer was running. I talked to my son about including that in the rating (the fact that it's hard to find time for timed, unpausable games) but he said that that shouldn't be factored in, since the game was specifically about being timed. So I won't. Edit: I've been told the game is pausable, so that fixes things! I didn't notice it earlier.

Story-wise, you are the Little Match Girl (whose powers are best discovered by playing one of the other Little Match Girl games), trying to stop a spaceship of villains from their plan of blowing a hole into heaven through the golden sphere that surrounds it. Along the way, a variety of shenanigans occur.

The game reminds me of Attack of the Killer Zombie Robot Yetis (or whatever the name is), in that it's meant to be played in one fell swoop with high stakes while cleverly disguising the way the game pushes you forward. I have a list on IFDB of games like this called "Linear Thriller Games" but haven't found many games to add to it recently. This one is an especially good example.

The timer starts out at 30 minutes but can change and adapt over time. I'm not sure what would happen if it got to 0.

The lore of the series continues to evolve. It is self-consistent. It reminds me of shows like Adventure Time and the Simpsons that start out with no continuity then end up, several seasons later, being very heavily continuity based with long storylines.

Overall, the dialogue, characters, world-building, story arc, and descriptions worked well for me.

Basically, you’re Hans Christan Andersen’s Little Matchstick Girl, aka Ebenezabeth Scrooge, and you’re trying to stop a team of mad scientists who are working to crack into a mysterious space artifact. They think it contains (Spoiler - click to show)heaven, but in fact, it’s a sort of (Spoiler - click to show)primordial life preserve.

The Golden Firmament is a bit like Ian Finley’s Babel and similar works in that it puts a sci-fi spin on religious and scientific ideas of hubris.

Veeder’s game relies much more on random humor, situations, and characters, though some of those are more thematically linked than at first glance.

Would it be better if it were more focused? I don’t know. The manic nature of the game means that commenting on anything would amount to mostly describing the jokes that I liked — which is a lot of them. So I’ll move onto how it played.

Approachable Difficulty Level

Before talking about the timer, I’ll touch on the puzzles and map.

I usually call myself bad at puzzles. While I rarely was confused by the puzzles here, I used the built-in hint function to solve a few (by typing ‘hint 2’). That worked pretty well.

There also seemed to be one point toward the end where the hint function gave me hints about the previous situation. It was close to the end, so it didn’t really matter.

More often, I lost myself in navigating the map. The layout started to make more sense toward the end, but I referred to wolfbiter’s transcript to get through parts of the game.

How the Timer Works

This isn’t the only IF game to use real-time gameplay. However, I imagine that most others are brief games focused on delivering a short experience and replayability. Most aren’t ambitious enough to apply a countdown to a full-fledged, parser adventure game.

The Golden Firmament encourages you to set aside time for a full playthrough. At first glance, that means setting aside 30 minutes.

However, the game actually awards more time as you progress. So it will probably take longer than 30 minutes, but it will also be more forgiving than you expect — unless you spend all 30 minutes stuck in a single segment.

More importantly, the game (Spoiler - click to show)gradually drifts away from the original time limit entirely. Sometimes, it puts you in timeless spaces. And toward the end, it puts you in a space with a shorter time limit (I had ~8 minutes). This serves to disorient the player – not just putting them in a different space, but under different time constraints.

What’s The Timer For?

That raises the question — what’s the intended effect of the timer?

A stripped-down version of the game can apparently be played without the timer — judging by the downloadable .gblorb version. On top of that, you can pause and even restore saves with the original time limit, which is a nice convenience but mostly a fallback for the player.

So the time limit basically exists to put pressure and relief on the player.

On one hand, I think that this pressure is enjoyable due to the manic nature of the game. In a heavier work, it would be more frustrating.

On the other hand, I think it would be better to make the importance of the timer entirely illusory. Making running out of time a ‘game over’ is a bit too much, IMO. (One point of comparison might be Chandler Groover’s The Bat, which had a money tally that seemed important and somewhat stressful, but which was ultimately inconsequential.)

But overall, I enjoyed The Little Matchstick Girl a lot, and I got what I was expecting out of it — plus an extra hour of playtime.