The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen (by Ryan Vedeer)

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Link to this game: The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen - Details

This was a 1-hour parser game about the titular fairy tale. You play as the little match girl exploring and doing a trading quest for four fantasy worlds.

Spoilers below!

This was a very strange story. I highly recommend reading the development diary after playing it, because the ending was bizarre. Originally, I wrote this comment to reply to Vedeer’s wordpress page where the dev diary was located, but as I found comments are disabled on there. So instead I’m here.

Thank you for writing this dev diary because I just finished the game and went, “What the fuck?” But confusion at the derangement seems to be absolutely what I was meant to feel. Things like the Japanese poem being a Neruda poem, Nash not selling cigarettes to an eight year old but giving me last resort opioids had me tilt my head, but the ending where the girl is cheerfully purchased by Ebenezer Scrooge for not five but fifteen whole shillings punched me in the gut. What the hell is going on? I think the joke flew over my head at first because I was too worried that it was meant in genuine good faith, which is ridiculous because Ebenezer Scrooge renames the girl Ebenzabith. (Not sure if I got that right – I closed the tab right after playing and lost the ending.)

But yeah this game is a lot of fun just because it’s so insane.

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Thank you for your interest in my game. I like it a lot.

I recently had the chance to play it with a few kids, around 5-9 years old. They thought the scene where Ebenezer Scrooge promises to buy the Little Match Girl from her evil father and name her Ebenezabeth was very funny.

But my favorite joke is when Nash says “don’t you take more than one at a time, unless you don’t know what’s good for you.”

You will be pleased to learn that the future adventures of the Little Match Girl are even more ridiculous, and even more touching, and quite a bit longer. I think The Little Match Girl 2 will come out from behind the Patreon paywall at the end of 2022, and then The Little Match Girl 3 a year after that. They were all released on Patreon one year apart, so I should release them publicly one year apart, right? Probably?

Anyone who would like to play the sequels immediately need only join up with my Patreon.

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