{"id":1768,"date":"2026-03-05T18:52:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T00:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/?p=1768"},"modified":"2026-03-05T18:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T00:52:11","slug":"on-the-little-match-girl-4-crown-of-pearls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/2026\/03\/05\/on-the-little-match-girl-4-crown-of-pearls\/","title":{"rendered":"On &#8220;The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It occurs to me that my thoughts in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/2026\/03\/05\/the-van-der-nagel-papyrus\/\">that post about &#8220;The Van der Nagel Papyrus&#8221;<\/a> derive not only from that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/2026\/03\/05\/on-puzzles-in-interactive-fiction\/\">essay I wrote about puzzles and gymnastics<\/a> but from something else I wrote in 2023\u2014a postmortem for <em><a href=\"https:\/\/rcveeder.net\/littlematchgirl\/pilcrow\/\">The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls<\/a>.<\/em> If you haven&#8217;t played that game, HOO BOY, YOU ARE IN FOR A TREAT. Go play it. Don&#8217;t worry about this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, here&#8217;s what I wrote after people had played LMG4:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Why is it that almost every Metroid game begins with Samus losing all the upgrades she acquired in the previous game? What kind of life is that, getting knocked down to a state of powerlessness over and over again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are a few reasons. For one thing, losing upgrades means you get to collect them again, and collecting upgrades is fun. And, I don\u2019t know if this is a second reason or just the other prong of the first reason, but by the end of any given game, Samus has become really, really powerful. Once she\u2019s got the Screw Attack on top of everything else, it\u2019s hard to imagine what other upgrades she could possibly collect. What kind of game would have her start out in that state? What would be left for her to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But also: Nintendo is trying to sell e.g.&nbsp;<em>Metroid Dread<\/em>&nbsp;to literally millions of people. They\u2019re selling it to highly enfranchised Metroid superfans. They\u2019re selling it to semi-enfranchised Metroid semifans. They\u2019re selling it to the people who have never played a Metroid, but who are willing to jump into a new one because they trust Nintendo or MercurySteam or the franchise\u2019s reputation. But they\u2019re also trying to sell it to&nbsp;<em>everyone else on Earth.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the developers need Samus to start from zero with every mission. They can\u2019t take the risk of starting at ten or fifty, because they can\u2019t afford to trust the player to trust them! And that means both parties are missing out on the opportunities that mutual trust would afford them.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/rcveeder.net\/littlematchgirl\/supi\/\">Fortunately, you and I don\u2019t have that problem.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It occurs to me that my thoughts in that post about &#8220;The Van der Nagel Papyrus&#8221; derive not only from that essay I wrote about puzzles and gymnastics but from something else I wrote in 2023\u2014a postmortem for The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls. If you haven&#8217;t played that game, HOO BOY, YOU [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose","category-text-adventures","category-video-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1768"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1769,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768\/revisions\/1769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}