Mary

As a reviewer, I play a lot of titles, and I make every effort to be kind with my words. I know that the development process is a big effort for a small team, so I attempt to give grace without compromising my assessment of a game. On occasion, however, I take the gloves off. Mary is described as a ‘mystery and investigation game.’ For me, the only mystery is what the developers were thinking when they published this as a finished game. Mary is made up of 3 chapters, The first is a room with two hot spots. You interact with both, answer some observation questions and leave. Chapter complete. Help text is in a mix of languages and overwrites itself. The flashlight works intermittently, and the camera has yet to function for me. I finally figured out that one of the observations needed for Chapter 1 is not mentioned until the following section. Hmm… Chapter 2 opens with a scene that makes very little sense and then drops you onto an empty street with one active door. The first time I played, I ended up in the interior of a house with a message about a notebook and no hotspots. I could move freely about and passed through a non-active door leading to an unfinished room. The only exit path was hitting Alt-Tab back to Steam. I try again. This time, the same door on the same street drops me onto a dirt road in a large field. Same dialog about the notebook and no hotspots. In the field, I can spin around but cannot move in any direction. Again, Alt-Tab back to Steam. I restart the game, spend the few minutes required in Chapter 1 and the game exits to the desktop when I try to leave the scene. I now have almost an hour invested and I am done with Mary. I am still trying to reconcile what I have just experienced with the game screenshots on the store page. So, would I recommend this game in its present form? Absolutely not. My hope is that the developer(s) will consider the current state of Mary and invest some time in getting it right. [quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32732116-IndieGems/]Follow [b]IndieGems[/b] if you enjoyed this review and want to see more like it.[/url][/quote]