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Everything, Everywhen, All At Prompt, December 28, 2023
Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This was my introduction to a series that seems to be picking up steam, with 5 of its 7 episodes coming out in 2023! Seriously author, tap the brakes. You’re making the rest of us look bad. In other media, I despair of jumping into in-flight series, preferring to reach back and ploddingly work the back catalog. IF seems friendlier to in media res, at least the ones I’ve dipped into so far. LMG4 is no exception, I was brought up to speed in the blink of an eye. It is a whimsical Dickens/Anderson/Whedon/Moffet mashup which maybe sounds more precious than it is.
I’m kind of feeling like with only a single, late episode exposure, maybe I’m not the one to explain LMG. The community probably knows this property a lot better than I do. But I’m gonna do it anyway because it’s just so GOOD. Anderson’s urchin Match Girl, through events, becomes a time traveling, vampire hunting ward of Ebeneezer Scrooge, serving Victorian England in averting a Faerie war (presumably on leave from her patronage with Poseidon?). With a six-shooter and empathy. What kind of drug-fueled fever dream produced THAT narrative stew?? Her name is Ebeneezabeth?!?! GET ME THAT COCKTAIL!
It’s structured as a treasure hunt, assemble MacGuffin pieces from a primeval past of dinosaur societies, an Old West silver mine, two different flavors of Pirates (Future Space and Musical Theatre), and a modern vampire conclave. I regret calling it whimsy, because as frothy and fun as it can be, there is an edge to this thing. Our protagonist is a zesty mixture of generous, earnest and no-nonsense. Yes, her first impulse is cooperative, but can flip surprisingly fast to cold anti-hero. In less deft hands it could feel disjoint and all over the place, but no. Here it somehow coalesces into a charged kind of narrative where anything could happen. The puzzle play is light but clever, assembling parts from across time periods to make headway with some nicely flavored environs. The mechanics of time travel are novel and kind of a mini-puzzle/maze of its own.
There are implementation issues, unimplemented nouns that are offputting early, before you get the measure of the piece. Soon though, the urgency of the mission takes over and sluices you easily into the work’s tightly controlled main thread. You are so engaged in the proceedings you have no interest in pulling at the fringes.
So many delightful in-the-moment touches. The escalating bad vampire brainstorming. The madcap disguises. A monologuing gunfight. Cross-timeline shenanigans. Interacting with incidental scenic elements, which is often daffy and rewarding. A fave:
> talk to roadrunner
“Hey,” you say. “Hey,” says the roadrunner, without stopping to look at you.
Lol, he’s got things to do, he’s got no time for you! This is what really makes the work sing - the ALIVE feeling of the universe. This is not a universe frozen in stasis until the player shows up. E-beth pops into others’ stories, (Spoiler - click to show)even her own!, gets what she needs and only disrupts things if she has to! In one instance with surprising pathos. As often as not, events continue to happen without needing or wanting her involvement. It’s a unique, really fun, vivid, breathing universe of casually weird genre mashups and bonkers timelines. Couple that with a generous but fierce protagonist, and I’m here for it. I got me some homework it seems.
Played: 10/24/23
Playtime: 2hrs, timer expired during epilogue!
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but will def track down other entries
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- Guenni (At home), December 18, 2023
- E.K., December 3, 2023
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Matchless, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
As discussed in my Eat the Eldritch review, boats are clearly the central theme of this year’s Comp. Little Match Girl 4 does OK on this score – there are some shipwrecked pirates, plus an extended sequence on a spaceship – but my experience with the game was largely defined by its membership in two other incipient trends of the Comp, being a sequel (I’ve already reviewed Shanidar, Safe Return, and looking ahead on my list there are a bunch more) and a Metroidvania (joining Vambrance of Destiny and Put Your Hand Into the Puppet’s Head).
Let’s take the sequel part first. I haven’t played any of the three prior Little Match Girl Games, and while I’m dimly familiar with the original Hans Christian Andersen story, any connection to that moralizing fable has long since fallen by the wayside; per a handy recap function, the eponymous protagonist has developed the power to travel through time and space by looking into fires, been adopted by a post-reform Ebenezer Scrooge, and currently works as a freelance sniper-cum-troubleshooter for Queen Victoria (England’s gain is Denmark’s loss; I guess she wasn’t very patriotic?).
The game seemingly isn’t especially fussed about any of this backstory, though, and in fact opens in medias res, with the introductory text not explaining anything about your immediate mission or situation. This kind of beginning can work well, but here I feel like it was misdeployed. It’s not used to skip boring exposition and get the player into the action from the get go, since the opening sequence just involves quiet exploration of a deserted beach. Nor does it do much to heighten player interest in what’s going on, since the actual plot is straightforward – you need to find half a dozen magic pearls as a combined peace offering/christening present to a baby fairy; i.e., it’s a fetch quest – and it’s effectively dropped in your lap ten minutes in without any deeper engagement or piecing together of clues required; you wander into Faerie and come across the infant prince and his caretakers, and everybody acts as though you already know the deal. As a result, the decision to forego a conventional introduction struck me as an odd one: I don’t think the game gains anything by it, but it loses the opportunity to establish stakes and engage the player in the world and the characters.
The Metroidvania aspects of the game also start slow. This is a genre convention, of course – the accretion of powers allowing you to overcome previously-encountered obstacles is a major part of the appeal – but I also found that the absence of minimap like that provided in Vambrance of Destiny, combined with the additional navigation challenge posed by the fire-portals leading to other settings meant it took me a while to wrap my head around the available space for exploration. It doesn’t help that the first few areas are rather straightforward – a ghost town, the age of the dinosaurs, a coast – with the few other people not especially engaging to interact with (LMG4 uses a TALK TO system without any dialogue options, which is probably my least-favorite way to implement character interaction in a parser game).
Fortunately, I found the game picked up by about the halfway point. Gaining a few additional abilities and a clearer sense of the map made the puzzle-solving feel more rewarding, and the environments became more interesting – the dinosaur era actually involves a modern, oddly-bougie civilization; the English coast is home to the actual Pirates of Penzance; and there’s a vampire-haunted Alpine chateau that’s the best of the bunch. The number of sly jokes and clever Easter Eggs also ramps up quickly from the comparatively-straight beginning: it took me a minute to realize that your first two upgrades mirror the ones Samus gets at the beginning of each Metroid game (Spoiler - click to show)(the fire-bullet is like a missile, and the mouse-transformation is like the morph ball); there’s an extended conference among the vampires that gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes – and it goes a long time; and there’s a disguise bit that I’m pretty sure is directly tweaking the Gabriel Knight 3 puzzle that’s long been decried as having killed graphic adventures all by itself.
Even in this running-downhill part of my experience with the game, though, I still found there were underexplained elements that I think must have been part of earlier games in the series – you seem to have some history with a couple of the specific vampires, you’ve encountered that prehistoric civilization before, and I’d guess that the climax is calling back to the very first game. So while I did eventually very much enjoy my time with LMG4, I can’t help but think that I would have liked it even more if I’d played the earlier games in the series, or even better, if it had done a bit more work to get new players up to speed. I can see how entering a late-series game in the Comp can help draw attention to earlier works, which is all to the good, but it’d be nice for us newbies to be met halfway.
- Johnnywz00 (St. Louis, Missouri), November 26, 2023
- bkirwi, November 25, 2023
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Visually pretty game set on multiple worlds with time travelling orphan assassin, November 22, 2023I’ve seen a few people saying they felt out of the loop with this game since they didn’t play the earlier little match girl games. I can say (having played the first 3 but not the offshoots) that the only thing important from the first games is in the recap. This game does continuity kind of like early Adventure Time, with mostly ‘adventure of the week’ stuff with occasional throwbacks.
The game features some beautiful styling, with nice location descriptions, music, and scrolling text. I missed some of the intro timed text since my son asked me for help with something; timed text isn’t so much of a pet peeve as it is something that just doesn’t fit into my play style of fitting in games around the corners of my life. Fortunately the ending could be scrolled back if missed!
Apparently this game has a ton in common with Metroid Prime. I’ve never played that game, but I looked it up and there are quite a few similarities, even some cameos, if you can call it that.
The overall structure, like most of the Matchgirl games, is that looking into any source of fire (outside of the nighttime stars) will teleport the player to one of five or so worlds. There’s some nice variety here, including space, dinosaurs, wild west, etc. The Pirates of Penzance had a strong presence.
Each area has some kind of powerup that helps you explore other areas. In the meantime, there are different diversions (such as helping a goldfish or doing a time typing game).
I found the structure and side quests engaging and fun. The writing was flawless for me and had its moments of gravitas. I observed how it was done with interest, as my current WIP is structure much like this one, with different worlds or dimensions leading to some emotional moments. I liked how it worked here, so it gave me more confidence.
I did get stuck once. I suspected I had missed some exit. I used location based hints and quickly realized I hadn’t noticed an exit, and then solved the game soon after that.
I can see the weight of a long series making it hard for people to get invested in playing a game, but this one as a standalone might as well be the introduction to the series, as continuity isn’t really a major feature of the games. They can be played in just about any order.
It’s nice to see high quality in the comp. Between Ryan Veeder, JJ Guest, BJ Best, we have three former winners entering well-done games, as well as newcomers producing polished games of great value.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Wacky fun, November 20, 2023All the Little Match Girl games are just plain wacky fun. The time/space-hopping, the Metroidvania-ness, and the outlandishness of the premise all make them a delight to play, and LMG4 is no exception. I loved the humor of the parser responses, the vividness and variety of the settings, the construction of the puzzles, the way the various worlds connect to each other, being able to (Spoiler - click to show)turn into a mouse and have chats with other animals, the commentary from the scanning lens, and (Spoiler - click to show)the poignant character moment at the end.
My only critiques are that I would have liked a bit more implementation of synonyms, and that when playing in browser (which I did for the pretty colors/other stylings), there’s a long sequence of timed text that repeats every time you sit down and reflect on how things are going. As you progress in the game, new text is added to the end of this segment; however, you still have to sit through the slow doling-out of the text you’ve already seen each time, with no way (as far as I could tell) to skip through or speed it up. But that's quite a minor thing--on the whole, I love this series and this game!
- CMG (NYC), November 19, 2023
- Passerine, November 19, 2023
- TheBoxThinker, November 15, 2023
- Edo, November 6, 2023
- jaclynhyde, October 16, 2023
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Blaze of glory, October 13, 2023The fourth numbered entry, and the sixth overall entry, in the distinguished series about the eponymous time-and-space-hopping assassin, formerly a tragic Hans Christian Andersen heroine. LMG4 drops the turn-based combat of its predecessor and returns to traditional puzzle-solving roots, while keeping the large, sprawling maps that need to be explored with pen-and-paper in hand (including prehistoric Montana, a far-future colony ship, an alpen castle and a frontier mining town).
No opening "mission briefing" this time round: you're dropped on a beach in Penzance with a picture of a lighthouse and told to get on with it. The game meanders at first before coalescing into a collect-the-pieces plot (pearls for the fairy prince's crown) but it's easy enough to grok that you need to explore every location you can: unlock doors, find light sources, shoot bad guys etc. There's plenty of optional content: I mistakenly thought a side quest about gathering signatures for a petition was actually the main objective, so was surprised when the quest-giver just gave a curt "ok thanks" type response and nothing else happened.
As expected of this series: great writing and well-balanced old-school gameplay (I only used the built-in hints once). But it's also the first entry that doesn't quite feel complete (there's a lot of setup for LMG5 that doesn't pay off in this entry) and the first entry where I felt it was content to rest on its laurels: there's no really innovative new stuff here that hasn't been seen previously. But the series already sets a very high quality bar, so it remains must-play stuff even while coasting.
- Sobol (Russia), October 8, 2023
- Denk, October 6, 2023
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
No time for tears, October 5, 2023Is The Little Match Girl my favourite fairytale? There are other fairytales that have better, more interesting stories. But ever since I was a kid, The Little Match Girl has had a special place in my heart because it makes me cry. Not that it's that hard to make me cry. In fact, dear readers, it's (in)famously easy. When in Piglet's Big Movie Piglet realised that the other animals were really his friends, I cried. And I was 40 years old when I watched it. When I and my wife have a spat, I usually end up holding back my tears while my wife complains that it's no fun being angry with me because I cry too easily. But most fairytales don't go for the tear ducts. Except, of course, for The Little Match Girl, which goes for it in the most direct and melodramatic way possible. What can I say? It's not great art, but I love it.
Although The Little Match Girl 4 is ostensibly by Hans Christian Andersen, it doesn't have much to do with the original story. Not having played the previous instalments, I rely on the in-game background to tell you that the original little match girl, instead of dying in the Copenhagen snows, found that the she could travel through time and space by looking intensely into a fire. She then became a sharpshooter and vampire hunter, as well as the adopted daughter of Dickens's Scrooge, who christened her Ebenezabeth. All of which makes little sense. Luckily, however, Ryan Veeder has a talent for taking something that makes little sense and then handling it as if he had no inkling about its senselessness... and then it starts making sense. Throwing together crazy ideas and then revelling in their craziness tends to get old pretty fast. But throwing together crazy ideas and then moving forward as if it's all perfectly normal, well, that is a way to generate unique and memorable settings. And I don't know if there's anyone in the IF scene who has developed that technique as much as Ryan has.
TLM4 is a light puzzle parser game with all the impeccable writing and smooth gameplay that one expects from a Veeder game. It's supposedly inspired by *Metroid Prime*, which I haven't played, but I gather that the basic idea is that you get new powers as you move forward, and these powers open up new passageways in areas you have already visited. In this case, your list of powers is simple: the ability to transport through fire, shooting flaming bullets, turning into a mouse, scanning things, and unlocking anything. All the puzzles in the game require you to use one of these powers, so it's fairly easy to get through everything without using the hints. You'll visit a wide variety of locations, which are heavily interconnected, and all of which correspond to one or another standard genre trope: dinosaurs, vampires, pirates, the Old West, spaceships. But Ryan brings enough charm and slight twists to each of them to make them feel fresh. The vampires are trapped in a terrible endless meeting; the pirates are, if I'm not mistaken, straight from Gilbert & Sullivan; the spaceship is being looted by space pirates who are more interested in vague mischief than real harm; and the journal you find near to an abandoned mine is... not what you expect. It doesn't cohere into a single setting, but all of it is fun.
The most intriguing thing about TLM4 is its tone. So much about it screams 'light-hearted fun' that I'm tempted to say that this is a game of light-hearted fun. The off-beat genre takes. The smooth, simple puzzles. The standard video game trajectory of getting more and more powers. The basic treasure finding plot line. And yet... it is quite obvious that at least one person is not having fun, and that is the little match girl herself. She is, if not quite a tormented person, at the very least troubled; even, perhaps, a little dead on the inside. We are told repeatedly that she no longer has the ability to be astonished at the majestic grandeur of the universe. She claims to make friends in all kinds of places, but she doesn't make friends at all, and the only person she has an emotional connection with is a guy she cannot forgive. And then there's a brief scene where we are transported back to Copenhagen, to the snow, to the hovel where she, as a child, is suffering with her brothers and sisters, waiting for salvation. It's all there in the game, but it's never really thematised; it's not hidden, but still never allowed to take over from the light-hearted fun.
I'm tempted to read all of that as a parable of Ryan Veeder's creative activity. If you follow him, you see a man who creates fun in many ways: elaborate RPG campaigns, highly polished IF games, cute plush toys, music tracks. But there's a darkness there too, never allowed to take over the work, but never quite absent. Like the little match girl, Veeder is shooting his flaming bullets around for all of us to enjoy -- but who knows how he feels on the inside?
Which is probably terrible psychologising. But hey, that's a parable for *my* creative activity; always trying to bring that darkness to light, get it out in the open, put it at the centre of attention, and then, if I really indulge myself (which I usually try not to), go for the tear ducts. What can I say? I love it.
- Zape, October 2, 2023
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