I’ve been kind of bingeing Ryan’s games over the past months. He’s prolific, inventive, and dedicated to providing a good time, and I find myself agreeing with a lot of his stated design goals and methods. Enough so that I subscribe to his Patreon to receive his monthly annotated source codes. A sample:
On New Year’s Eve, he released two games in his series of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl adaptations. The original story has the little girl freeze to death; in Ryan’s version, she doesn’t die, but instead becomes a time-traveling assassin. The second game was made available to the public through itch.io and IFDB, while Patreon subscribers now get to play the newest fourth entry. I hadn’t really played much of any of them previously, so I’ve been doing so. Slight spoilers follow.
The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen - we start out firmly in the territory of the original story, as our little girl is freezing to death with only the matches she is supposed to sell to keep her warm.
Striking a match introduces the unifying characteristics of the LMG franchise: looking at fire causes the little girl to jump through time and space. At her home time in London, the narrative is in the third person, but “parser traditional” second-person text asserts itself the moment she is elsewhen—along with a change in background color, and a departure from the Andersonian language of the original text. A quirk of her talent is that, no matter where or when she appears, she can speak and understand the people she encounters, and nobody finds it all that unusual that a little girl should be present. A little girl in the sewers of Paris? In a desert gas station? In Atlantis? Sure, why not?
As I attested on Twitter, I bounced off this game when I first tried it. I usually don’t have much patience for puzzles, particularly traditional text adventure stuff like hunger daemons and maze navigation, and this game started with one of the most fundamental such challenges—a room in need of a light source. After playing though most of LMG2, I came back and finished it, though I did have to consult an external resource because I was too busy imagining a gas station in my head to properly examine all the contents of said gas station.
This is basically the trading sequence from Link’s Awakening! You find something, you show it or give it to the right person, who gives you something else, etc. So, lots of jumping back and forth between eras and a little bit of trial-and-error. In the end, you find some things that actually accompany you back to London, and you are able to bring about a change in your fortune. The ending is goofy and fun.
The Little Match Girl 2: Annus Evertens is bigger and better-implemented. You’re ghostly and insubstantial no longer, and this time around, there’s no need to hop back and forth between periods. You go to a place, you find the fire, and you move on. I’m just going to name a few of my favorite things you encounter with zero context to understand them: the Greek god. The cyber-skull. The pirate journal. The Horrible Flukeworm. The room. This game has some A+ twists and turns.
The Little Match Girl 3: the Escalus Manifold requires a Patreon subscription to access, but I’ve only played a little bit of it because the ambition on display here is frightening. It comes with a 16-page instruction manual. That is not normal among IF games. People with too much enthusiasm for the taxonomy of game formats could object to me calling this IF. I like what I’ve played, but I’m going to have to dedicate a weekend to this.
The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls is the one that just came out for Patreon subscribers. While the systems complexity has stepped back from LMG3’s heights, LMG4 revels in the narrative world these games have been constructing. It feels like a celebration—like a victory lap. I’m actually stuck partway through, and I do not want help, and it’s already my favorite. Some of the games I’ve been reminded of while playing, in no particular order, sometimes for the most frivolous of reasons: Chrono Trigger. Metroid. Vampire: the Masquerade. Castlevania. Chrono Trigger, again. The Ravenloft campaign setting. Ryan’s own Taco Fiction. Typing of the Dead. Minish Cap. What Remains of Edith Finch. Dino Crisis. Monkey Island. Fairy Tale. Eternal Darkness. I could go on.
In short: games are good.