Marie Waits

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1-7 of 7

Truly torn, September 3, 2023

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.

There’s a surprising number of keys, doors, and locks considering how small this game is. It left an aftertaste of adventure games from my youth, where blue keys opened blue doors, and so on.

I’m truly torn; this is a title I definitely wanted to like. I still think it could have been more than the sum of its parts if the emphases had been different. But the reliance on old-school puzzle mechanics, a constrained vision of story scope, and a lack of polish left me flat. Marie Waits feels rushed, much like the protagonist is in her escape, which is too bad.

Stirred, not Shaken, July 12, 2023

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, die twice, then win

At this point, I think we sometimes agree to pretend that parser IF will be enjoyed equally by novices and old hands alike. That as a form its evolved norms have made parser IF more friendly and less obtuse. There is some truth to this, of course. Certainly modern games are less cruel than their ancestors. Everyone who has a second is going to have a first IF experience and it COULD be any modern game in the archive. Even so, there are many informal norms that are deduced over time, like:
* If it’s listed, it will likely be important sooner or later.
* Walls and ground are rarely, but sometimes, interesting.
* Any location not connecting other locations has a purpose as a source of clues, objects or puzzles.

Despite having recently returned to the hobby (and enjoyed discovering the intervening years’ progress), my game play can never not be informed by the informal norms of the form. (“…informed by the informal norms of the form.” I wasn’t even trying and look what my brain came up with!)

It doesn’t feel calculated, so I’m going to say Marie Waits effortlessly leverages these informal norms to make a rarefied parser experience. The game opens with you, a plucky English detective, captured by villains and needing to escape before time runs out and their plan comes to fruition. There are objects to find, locked places to escape, and backstory and clues to discover. The text is constrained, with terse descriptions of environs and objects. The places are tight - each location with just a few things to interact with, maybe lugging around to be used later, maybe needed now. This has the nice side effect of constraining the noun/verb space within the bounds of normy actions. The ‘can’t do that’ messages seem fair and few. The spark of this game is the time limit. You are given three hours to secure your escape, and minutes tick by maddeningly fast.

Between the text, the location design, tight vocabulary space and the time limit, after two missteps I felt like this game put me in some Platonic Ideal IF Player zone. Leisurely trying random things to see how deep the implementation was was not going to be rewarded. There was a premium on leveraging meta norms to search, poke, prod at high payoff areas and shed distractions. And they were almost always rewarded! (Spoiler - click to show)There’s a bush here. Imma needa dig that soon as I can." “Can’t find exit, check the walls.” “Got a match, gonna need to light it when it gets dark.” It sounds like I’m running this game down, but I don’t mean it that way at all. It really felt like I was in the IF Zone, clicking along with the puzzles because of the tight adherence to metagame in a way that felt harder for newbies than me, but made me feel like a king.

Everyone who has a second whiskey has had a first. And it suuuuucks. The mouth experience runs contrary to millennia of species-preserving evolution. It’s kind of a miracle anyone ever has a second. But maybe you take it with coke for a few years in college, then someone introduces you to a perfect Old Fashioned, and before you know it, you’re having two fingers at night just to stay sane. I mean, you have grown to appreciate the nuances of the flavors. You even start differentiating whiskeys from each other as better or worse, but really as what is the best whiskeyness for your palate.

That’s what this felt like to me. Not a super sweet combination of spirits drowning in fruit juice. An unadorned experience that showcases the learned pleasures of a very specific flavor for someone who has trained themself to appreciate it. A perfect two fingers of cask strength IF to be savored and enjoyed, but quickly before those thugs come back.

A quick note on the narrative. The game makes an interesting choice to foreground the ‘escape from bad guys’ stakes (that is where the urgency lies after all), but background the underlying mystery that got you caught in the first place. As you navigate the spaces, bolting for freedom, you periodically find clues that trigger flashbacks. These flashbacks provide discrete snapshots of mystery pieces, puzzle pieces if you will. Some that snap into others to expand your knowledge, others that are in empty spaces of the puzzle tantalizingly hinting at a larger picture. The incompleteness of the mystery both underlines how inessential it is to the urgency of the escape, yet implies a compelling larger struggle outside the bounds of this 3 hours (game time. less than half that clock time.) It is just the right spice, the bitters to the cocktail if you will, that make this a crisp, satisfying experience.

So, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing this game to a perfect cocktail for the spirits enthusiast. The dirty secret is, when I really enjoy a perfect cocktail, I usually want another one behind it! Marie? You gonna keep me waiting?

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: In Media Mystery
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I see that this is an entry in a series of games, which is absolutely what I was about to recommend. If it were mine, I might entertain a deconstructed mystery approach: a series of short IF showcasing discrete sequences of an overarching mystery. Perhaps out of order. Standalone IF type puzzle games, (or even disparate IF forms: a Twine detective relationship game! A Texture code breaking excercise! An I dunno Ren’Py point and click!) whose full mystery only makes sense when fully assembled. If this was already the path… points for guessing it?

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

I waited 180 times…, June 22, 2023

…and that didn’t end well.

So now that we’re sure it’s not a waiting simulator, I’ll say that I enjoyed the game pretty well. I almost skipped over it because I don’t generally enjoy the stress of a timed game, but this one kept things small enough in scope that it wasn’t too intimidating, although I did use a little bit of save/restore in one area to give myself more time to freely examine things. I had some parser trouble in a couple of places and had to consult the walkthrough once just for syntax, but it worked for the most part.

I actually thought the story that was drip-fed to you was pretty intriguing, and I would have liked to have had more revelations in that regard, but I gather that there’s more story to come in future games.

Tense time-limited parser game, May 16, 2023

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.

A brief exploration- and conspiracy-heavy parser game, May 14, 2023

The first Marie game, Pre-Marie, was the first Adventuron game I ever played, and it gave me a good impression.

This one fleshes out the details significantly. It's in PunyInform, I think.

I'm giving it 5 stars, but not necessarily because I think most people will adore it. It simply had a nice combination of things I like: a vague conspiracy, a tense mystery setting, logical but kind of sticky parser puzzles and a lot of standard parser gameplay. And the in-game timer provided some tension. So for me that's exactly what I was looking for in a game.

The idea is that you are investigating a kind of conspiracy related to you and your town, but you've been kidnapped and stuffed somewhere. There's just a hint of the supernatural, possibly a fakeout or even unintentional. Most of the game involves escaping from your situation in progressively larger containers/rooms/locations.

Pretty fun, if you just want a brief chill parser game. I fought with the parser a couple of times, but it was overall pretty smooth.

In a pit, tied to a chair., May 4, 2023

(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!

Linear, plot-driven parser puzzler, April 10, 2023

I played this one all the way through in one go. This is because it is rather short (three hours of diagetic time, quite a bit less of mine) but it is also because it is tense and tightly paced; I'm not sure what the IF equivalent of a page-turner is, but this is definitely that.

The game itself is a linear series of classic parser puzzles, none very difficult, all reasonably well clued, and most tied to progress in the story. (A bit artificial, since most of it is our character explaining more of the backstory, but narratively it works just fine.) Normally I appreciate a little more freedom and challenge in a game, but in this context I think this all well - it's more of a gauntlet to run than a world to explore, and complex puzzles would have spoiled the fast pace and made the time limit frustrating.

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