The Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament by Ryan Veeder (@Afterward )
I’ve played a few of Ryan Veeder’s games, but this is the first entry that I’ve played in his Little Matchstick Girl series.
The only thing I know about the series is based on what I’ve read in reviews — that these games are random and episodic. Combined with the sheer number of entries, I’ve kind of put them on my backlog indefinitely because they seem increasingly daunting.
So if The Golden Firmament didn’t have the time limit feature to set itself apart, I probably would have saved it for later with the rest.
Of course, I did play the game …
The Story In Short
Basically, you’re Hans Christan Andersen’s Little Matchstick Girl, aka Ebenezabeth Scrooge, and you’re trying to stop a team of mad scientists who are working to crack into a mysterious space artifact. They think it contains heaven, but in fact, it’s a sort of primordial life preserve.
The Golden Firmament is a bit like Ian Finley’s Babel and similar works in that it puts a sci-fi spin on religious and scientific ideas of hubris.
Veeder’s game relies much more on random humor, situations, and characters, though some of those are more thematically linked than at first glance.
Would it be better if it were more focused? I don’t know. The manic nature of the game means that commenting on anything would amount to mostly describing the jokes that I liked — which is a lot of them. So I’ll move onto how it played.
Approachable Difficulty Level
Before talking about the timer, I’ll touch on the puzzles and map.
I usually call myself bad at puzzles. While I rarely was confused by the puzzles here, I used the built-in hint function to solve a few (by typing ‘hint 2’). That worked pretty well.
There also seemed to be one point toward the end where the hint function gave me hints about the previous situation. It was close to the end, so it didn’t really matter.
More often, I lost myself in navigating the map. The layout started to make more sense toward the end, but I referred to @wolfbiter’s transcript to get through parts of the game.
How the Timer Works
This isn’t the only IF game to use real-time gameplay. However, I imagine that most others are brief games focused on delivering a short experience and replayability. Most aren’t ambitious enough to apply a countdown to a full-fledged, parser adventure game.
The Golden Firmament encourages you to set aside time for a full playthrough. At first glance, that means setting aside 30 minutes.
However, the game actually awards more time as you progress. So it will probably take longer than 30 minutes, but it will also be more forgiving than you expect — unless you spend all 30 minutes stuck in a single segment.
More importantly, the game gradually drifts away from the original time limit entirely. Sometimes, it puts you in timeless spaces. And toward the end, it puts you in a space with a shorter time limit (I had ~8 minutes). This serves to disorient the player – not just putting them in a different space, but under different time constraints.
What’s The Timer For?
That raises the question — what’s the intended effect of the timer?
A stripped-down version of the game can apparently be played without the timer — judging by the downloadable .gblorb version. On top of that, you can pause and even restore saves with the original time limit, which is a nice convenience but mostly a fallback for the player.
So the time limit basically exists to put pressure and relief on the player.
On one hand, I think that this pressure is enjoyable due to the manic nature of the game. In a heavier work, it would be more frustrating.
On the other hand, I think it would be better to make the importance of the timer entirely illusory. Making running out of time a ‘game over’ is a bit too much, IMO. (One point of comparison might be Chandler Groover’s The Bat, which had a money tally that seemed important and somewhat stressful, but which was ultimately inconsequential.)
But overall, I enjoyed The Little Matchstick Girl a lot, and I got what I was expecting out of it — plus an extra hour of playtime.