@jmac and @DougOrleans played through my game “How the Little Match Girl Got Her Colt Paterson Revolver, and Taught a Virtue to a Goblin” on YouTube yesterday, and it was a lot of fun, especially for YOURS TRULY. Although I was watching along the whole time, I tried to keep my presence in the chat to a respectful minimum, because how can you enjoy a game being streamed while the dev is off to the side, explaining every little detail?
If you would like to enjoy Jason and Doug’s stream with the dev off to the side explaining every little detail, I put together a “commentary track” with timestamps that you can open in another window off to the side of the video (or something). Does this commentary retread any of the same ground as the Annotated Source Code Text distributed to annotations-level members of the Ryan Veeder Patreon? i do not remember
COMMENTARY TRACK
1:22 - This was the first side-game in the series, written after the first four main entries but taking place right after LMG1. The “many adventures” in the narration refer to games that take place after this one, and the title frames this story as going back to explain information (the possession of a revolver) that the reader apparently already knows about from “later” games. So in one sense the game is set up as a sort of appendix to LMG1-4. Except LMG4 was a Patreon-only game at the time this game was released. But also this was written as an EnigMarch puzzle, and designed to be intelligible to someone who hadn’t played any of those other games. This is one of the reasons I don’t think it really makes sense to worry about a “correct order” or “intended order” for playing through the series.
1:53 - Unlike in Andersen’s original story, where the little match girl was experiencing hallucinations or supernatural visions, in these stories everything is quite real (and, gulp, obliged to follow some internal logic).
2:41 - The original version of the game was written in three days, but this version is dated December 4, 2024 (release number notwithstanding) and incorporates numerous bug fixes—AND YET THERE ARE MORE BUGS
7:00 - “The old man had told Ebenezabeth all about his life” - Does that include telling her that he himself was briefly a time traveler???
8:43 - We are at the Great Falls of the Passaic River, around 40.915º N, 74.180º W. I have no particular fondness for New Jersey or the Passaic River but they keep showing up in these games for some reason.
15:00 - “You have a good idea of what it all adds up to” makes a lot more sense (that is, makes any sense at all) if the player has examined the building more closely from outside! But in the absence of that context it is pretty clever of Doug to guess that “adds up” is some kind of clue—this is an angle for puzzles I have been chewing on for some time.
18:43 - The year 1846 is given in the Big Text for our “home base” timeframe, but the Big Text for other areas doesn’t include the year. It isn’t until LMG3 that Ebenezabeth can tell what year it is when she arrives somewhere.
22:30 - This game’s structure is almost identical to that of the first game, except that in LMG1, you had to light the four matches and “meet” the four realms in a set order. You didn’t pick up the first trading sequence item until you were in the the fourth realm, meaning you couldn’t solve anybody’s problems the first time you ran into them. That way, hopefully, the settings feel like real places, and the characters come off as real people, and the puzzle flow has some friction rather than solving itself like a row of dominos.
In this game, all four realms are available from the beginning, so it’s possible—but undesirable!—for various problems to be solvable in the moment you first encounter them. To wit: The first thing Jason and Doug did was pick up the coat; almost the next thing they did was meet Eshak, who needs the coat. To create the necessary friction (and I’m PRETTY SURE I did this intentionally?), Eshak doesn’t introduce his situation in terms of “gosh what I really need is a warm coat.” He talks about going to the frozen north and says he isn’t brave enough, which puts the problem in terms of somehow supplying him with courage. When a portable form of courage doesn’t present itself, and the player starts wondering, “well, I have a coat, what can I do with that?” then hopefully Eshak arises as a possibility, and you get to solve the puzzle by thinking, instead of through sheer momentum.
24:08 - Jason and Doug must be remembering Urimedonte, the villainous vampiress of LMG1. Not a spider lady exactly, but she did have a “won’t you come into my parlor” vibe.
26:12 - I really thought it was pronounced like “steel” but these websites are telling me it’s pronounced like “steely.”
29:30 - As of this adventure, Ebenezabeth is still somewhat incorporeal when she travels, but that won’t last long.
38:29 - Some kinda bug here! The conversation with the goblin is supposed to change based on whether you’ve heard only the soldier’s sob story, or only the dancer’s, or both, or neither. The texts for only having heard one or the other are basically the same, because I wouldn’t want you to miss out on the sentence “Love is a source of misery to all who wallow in its benightedness.” The conversation you’re supposed to see if you’ve talked to both other characters is:
“It seems to me that you’ve told lies to both the tin soldier and the paper dancer, who would be very happy if they would only talk to each other,” you say. “Why are you doing this?”
“To protect them from the tortures of love!” the goblin wails. “I’m looking out for their best interests, I swear I am!”
You stare up into his eyes, little knots of black thread.
“All right, you got me,” he relents. “I’m just lying to screw with them—because I like screwing with people.”
“I think you should tell them the truth,” you say.
“Or else what?” He sneers. “You gonna lecture me to death?”
39:35 - I was going to say “Jason’s assumption of what is going on in this game is very cool, but incorrect” but I guess he basically turns out to be correct in the end.
40:30 - If Jason and Doug have only played LMG1 and LMG2 then this is indeed the first time they’ve been to Mars! I think Jason is thinking of visiting the moon in LMG2.
46:09 - Jason notices the mirroring of the Byblos and Tharsis maps so fast. Amazing. I don’t think they pointed this part out, so allow me to point out that the Albus Burnside statue mirrors the stele dedicated to King Azibaal.
48:40 - My fun fact for this was going to be that the names “Hadar” and “Zadar” are etymologically related, but I might be misremembering something.
57:46 - Here’s some information about Colt’s gun mill in Paterson and its ridiculous decorations: Samuel Colt Gun Mill
1:10:01 - How does Ebenezabeth know how old the dye is? She must already be developing the intuition that will allow her to pinpoint years by the time we get to LMG3. (The dye is “about” three thousand years old from her 1846 perspective, but the figure is somewhat more accurate from where she stands on Mars.)
1:10:45 - Why does Hadar want the dye? It’s just worth a lot of money. It was valuable even to Zadar, and it’s even more valuable on Mars as an impossibly authentic antique. The machine Hadar uses to verify its authenticity can’t be carbon-dating it, though, because from its own perspective the dye is pretty fresh.
1:13:17 - “It’s heavier than you expected.” TELL ME ABOUT IT
1:13:34 - Historical inaccuracy! In LMG3, Ebenezabeth’s revolver explicitly has six chambers—but the historical Colt Paterson had five! Flawless justification: Ebenezabeth’s revolver is not a production model, but a prototype built especially for her while she was telling her long story. Hans Christian Andersen thought of everything.
1:17:20 - “Cynically applying information from outside the game” is exactly what the narration was doing earlier, invoking the title when it said “That’s how Ebenezabeth got her famous Colt Paterson Revolver, but she still had something else left to do.”
1:18:35 - There are a bunch of symmetries between characters in the paper castle, and Ebenezabeth uses “I see.” to close conversations with all three of them—but “I see.” isn’t exactly a devastatingly clever catchphrase.
1:21:36 - Okay but why does the game DENY ALL INPUT after you give the correct answer? This is because I couldn’t figure out how to make the correct answer end the story in the normal way. I have since solved that dumb problem, and hopefully this part of the game has been fixed by the time you read this.