Marie Waits

(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 version.)

In this tense and fast-moving thriller, Marie must escape her mysterious captors before the bright lights kill her.

This was a very fast-paced but smooth ride.

Marie Waits is a time-constrained turn-optimisation game.

Fortunately, it’s also a game that emphasises letting the player get on with it, quickly scanning the scene and picking out the important items (along with unimportant ones and currently inaccessible ones, of course.) No futzing with intricate machinery or 8-move back-and-forth puzzles, but obstacles that must and can be dealt with fast.

The writing is inobtrusive, it mostly keeps to the background and focuses on conveying the necessary practical information. Precisely this makes it so effective. It reads fast and pulls you along. Even though I started the game thinking I would take it easy, letting my PC die and learn for the next restore, I wound up captivated and tense, feeling the urgency of getting the hell out of there.

Here and there, the author does take the tempo down a notch to show some shreds of backstory through found notes. Very intruiging, and a good reason to play the other Marie-games. (One already out, one upcoming, I believe?)

Of course my testing instincts kicked in at a certain point. I tried to sneakily cut some corners and squeeze some commands in before my PC ought to be able to perform those actions. I was impressed that the author caught almost all these instances. I managed to smuggle one minor shortcut past the radar, shaving two moves (I think) off my total.

In the end, I was out of there by quarter past ten. Time to spare for Marie to take a shower and meet her friends for brunch.
Escaping mysterious kidnappers and avoiding a mid-day burning blast? All part of the morning chores.

Lots of fun!

I have a pet theory that Americans who call themselves Anglophiles are kind of like people who say they love movies: We all love movies in some way. The question is the kind of movie that draws you in. Likewise, I think all Americans are Anglophiles in some capacity, it just depends on what element of British culture you’re attracted to. For some, it’s British popular music. For others, it’s the glamour and gossip of the royal family.

It’s the English village crime/mystery story which fascinates me. At one point or another, every British sleuth, from Sherlock Holmes to Poirot to Inspector Morse, finds themself facing an English village shopkeeper, or snooping through an English manor’s overgrown garden, or at the village pub buying a pint for the local wag. The folksy and cheery charms of the village mystery is uniquely English, even if the subject matter is morbid.

That’s why I looked forward to Dee Cooke’s latest. Previously I was wowwed by Things that Happened in Houghtonbridge for all those Anglophilic reasons described above: A decaying family home, a cast of local busybodies, and the submerged secrets stirred to the surface by a plucky young protagonist. The mystery had a lot of character and a lot of personal moments mixed in with the usual adventure game fare of snooping around and collecting details. There’s good reasons Houghtonbridge took third place in last year’s ParserComp and claimed a clutch of prizes in the recent IFDB Awards.

Marie Waits offers similar fare: You are Marie, a young woman from the (fictional?) town of Crossley, England. You’ve been captured by a group known as Farr North after your investigation draws a little too close to them and their operations. The game opens with you tied up at the bottom of a pit “in a small hut in the middle of Nowhere, Essex.” Your captors vow to return in two hours and thirty minutes to finish you off. Your goal is fairly obvious: Get the hell out of there.

According to Cooke’s notes, this game is part of a currently incomplete series that starts with 2020’s Pre-Marie. As such, the story line feels ragged when played standalone. It’s apparent there’s a lot of backstory here, but even upon completion of the game, I didn’t feel I truly understood the import of all that transpired. It pretty much is an escape game with a turn limit, which blunted the emotional impact of the final winning moment.

Alas, the English village charms I looked forward to didn’t materialize. The game is heavily restricted to escaping from said hut and reaching civilization by way of a dark forest. You bump into dead bodies along the way, but their relationship to Marie and her plight were less-characterized than one would hope. (One unlucky soul was apparently a rando in the wrong place at the wrong time.) The room descriptions are perfunctory and sparse, and the puzzles are solved in serial fashion. The most human moments come from a series of notes you find along the way.

The first play-through, I ran out of time. I believe most moves count as a minute, meaning I chewed up a lot of free time with my nervous tic of typing >X to look around when I’m fishing for ideas. My second attempt, I managed to finish with time to spare, although I was basically speed-running through the first two-thirds of the game. The timer obviously imparts a sense of urgency to the situation, but it wound up feeling forced. The use of time was much better managed in Houghtonbridge, where its passing was used for appointments with characters and events transpiring elsewhere in town.

I found myself playing guess-the-verb on a few occasions. Reliance on default messages and the like gives the game an unfinished feel, such as how the usable items in this location are described twice:

You are in a small, high-walled yard. To the north is one side of the standalone hut that comprises the wooden room, including its door. To the west is a rickety-looking shed, also with a door, painted green. The other two sides of the yard are blocked by high stone walls, with a high, solid gate in the southwest corner between the wall and the shed.
…
You can also see a green door, a wooden door and a gate here.

This is a time-limited parser game where you have to escape from a very dangerous situation. It is briskly written, with lots of atmosphere, scares and tension. However I found that I was often fighting the parser. The experience could have been smoother. I don’t know if it being in PunyInform was a factor, but e.g. if I had a key for something that it obviously fitted UNLOCK X wouldn’t smoothly work. I had to type UNLOCK X WITH Y KEY. There’s also quite a bit of juggling tools, where again you need just the right command. So I think this could have benefited from deeper playtesting. However it was exciting to play, and the concept is strong. I got a good ending but also had a look at what happened when time runs out. So good stuff, but playtest more, and if possible smooth the player experience.