IFComp 2023
This was my first encounter with Ryan Veeder's “Little Match Girl” series. It's great! A time-hopping pulp adventure with vampires and space pirates and dinosaurs. This felt “oldschool” to me in a Lucasarts adventure sense - quite player-friendly and well-clued, but very little handholding, with lots of poking at the edges of the map for unsolved mysteries. Jumping into the middle of something like this is a little like my experience with *Doctor Who*, where I'm never going to go back and watch all of it, but the size of the back catalog can enrich the newer stuff. The game does a great job with the small reminders to bring me up to speed as needed.
I absolutely love the Saul Bass-esque visual design - it centers typography, with big bold titles on solid colors setting the scene for each era, and a large and readable handwriting font for the plot-important journal you find.
There's a great interactive comedy beat where you are hiding in a closet and trying to assemble a disguise by rummaging through the junk. Fortunately it fools the not-too-bright Pirates of Penzance (no jokes about being born in a leap year, but that's probably for the best). I also liked the sidequest where you're getting animals to sign a petition making a future goldfish their representative.
When I got stuck and turned to the walkthrough, the clue I needed was that I could burn the wall of brambles in 67M BC. Other burnable objects had clues about bring dry or brittle, while the bramble bush was a sturdy living plant thriving in a lava-filled landscape; and rather than switch into “try everything” mode I felt okay pulling up the walkthrough so I could see more of the game in two hours. I'm glad I did! It's a great player's guide with background and maps and clues, rather than a list of required commands. I recommend reading it even if you didn't need it.
Amazing work!