The Little Match Girl 3: The Escalus Manifold

I was a playtester for this game.

All of the Little Match Girl games follow the titular little girl on a delightful quest through time and space, and I look forward to them every year because they’re so adventurous and funny and surprising. But this one takes the series in a completely unexpected direction by adding a full-blown turn-based combat system, with party members and equippable items and everything. Usually I’m not playing IF (or any games) for the battles, but this game brought back the exact feeling of sitting in front of my little TV in 199X playing SNES with my brother, and it’s honestly amazing that a text adventure can do that.

The combat system is so robust it has its own instruction manual, but the gameplay is pretty straightforward even if you don’t read it (though it definitely helps, and there are some useful options you can toggle). It’s not really violent—this is a good-hearted story with the little match girl as its reluctant hero, after all. And anyway, there’s a lot more to this game than just fighting battles: the story is weighty and wide-ranging, there are strange items from various worlds that you can find and experiment with, and you get to team up with (Spoiler - click to show)a cool-ass mermaid for goodness’ sake. It's clear a lot of care went into every detail, right down to the pitch-perfect barks.

There’s so much going on in this game that it doesn’t feel like it could possibly work, but somehow it does, while carrying on the charming tradition of the first two LMG games—which, if you haven’t played those, I recommend starting there and then reserving a couple hours on a cold winter’s night for this one.