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.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/10/25
Playtime: 1hr 10m, finished

If there is a word for this series, it is ‘inventive.’ Hey, there all millions of words! We could ALL get one! I think I want to dibs ‘maladroit.’ Match Girl gets ‘inventive.’ This deep into the series, it doesn’t seem like there should be a strong need for summary, but keeping to review discipline: Hans Christian Anderson’s nameless Little Match Girl gets Daddy Warbucks’d by Ebeneezer Scrooge (and takes his name) while having cross-time adventures because fire is a time portal for her. And gradually assembles an entire portfolio of wildly disparate weapons, skills and allies while doing so.

There is a bit of a Dr. Who vibe to things, with most every stop in time being either an idiosyncratic historical pull (death of Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens!), a completely fanciful distant period of time, or a quick revisit of characters past. As often as not, the puzzle solving involves a clockwork of cross-time dependencies including how to find the flames needed for continued travel.

This episode does not disappoint in any of those dimensions, most especially the far future techno-religion that is this work’s main antagonist. This iteration compounds its formula with two specific new elements that work (and work together) like gangbusters: real-time dialogue and a countdown timer.

The real-time dialogue is essentially snooping on the antagonist radio frequency, getting to hear their (often amusing) back and forth as the plot progresses. I heeded the work’s guidance to play in an interpreter with html-like formatting support and was glad I did. This choice gave me font and color cues to help differentiate the different timelines, but also was used to great effect in incidental dialogue. The illusion of realtime responses by active NPCs was very strong, not the least of which because the conversations were so DEEP we never got into ‘mimesis death via robotic repetition.’

That last was itself partially due to the realtime countdown timer addition. Yup, from the jump, an uncomfortably tight and graphically centered countdown timer hangs over you like a Damoclean Sword. How relevant is a realtime timer to a time-hopper? How relevant is: 'shut up'? What a great dramatic device this was. Timers have a focusing effect on the player. This will be no leisurely saunter through the author’s implementation space, casually and belligerently poking into every crack until you find the implementation threshold then harumphing superciliously. We all do that, right?

No, the timer focuses you relentlessly on the immediate task at hand. In tension with and reinforcing the realtime dialogue, it represents a disincentive to test the author’s limits. You want to listen in more but HAVE NO TIME. It really is a wonderful mechanical synergy that sells the conflict and setting.

The timer ALSO really focuses the parser gameplay. A lot of parser games are characterized by experimentally fiddling with bizarre artifacts to find the complete left field way it needs to be manipulated to make progress. No time for that here! Every unsuccessful puzzle attempt drains away your remaining time making things sweeter when solved and tenser when not. It almost goes unnoticed that the DIFFICULTY of those puzzles is finely tuned here too, giving the player a fair chance at success and letting the timer inflict the tension, not the puzzle itself.

The prose is similarly tuned to the pressures of the game. No extended descriptions, elaborate joke setups and payoffs. No, everything is streamlined to the accelerated playstyle. Most especially the wry humor of the piece.

All in all, I found this a hugely successful iteration and tweaking of the franchise, even if it might hide a TERRIBLE SECRET, spoil-blurred: (Spoiler - click to show)I don’t think the timer is real! Not as real as it presents. There are enough relief valves to provide moments of build and release around accomplishment, themselves very well distributed into dramatic mini-crescendos. These releases felt both earned but also subverting of the conceit. Now, I did not test this, even though it would be trivial to do so. This is also due to the effectiveness of the conceit - even with my suspicions I completely embraced the work on its own terms because that delivered the best experience.

I know I dibbed ‘maladroit’ earlier, but is ‘satiated’ taken yet?

Horror Icon: Jigsaw /Freddie
Vibe: Bonkers Adventure
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : Honestly, I’m kind of at a loss here. I think if it were my project I would be satisfied with the precisely engineered experience on display. Perhaps smugly so.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

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.