LogFAQs > #975989328

Currently Playing: Lost Your Marbles

What Is It? Uh. Marble Madness meets a CYOA, I guess?

Thoughts:
-I actually have mostly the opposite problem of TomNook! I'm fine with the talk-y parts. I'm way less fine with the non talk-y parts.
-You play as Prota, who has unfortunately lost her marbles through a classic science experiment fiasco. Hate it when that happens.
-She starts her new job working for Professor Marbles, a sentient cat genius. Yes, this game really likes to look at you and make sure you know how QUIRKY and WEIRD it is. Lot of the humor here feels kinda cringe adjacent, like an early 2010's sort of lolcat type humor.
-Marbles has made a Marbelizer to celebrate the towns upcoming ball festival which is basically a little festival put on the town that celebrates...balls? No not that kind. Pervert.
-Anyway, things go sideways because Prota is completely irresponsible, a them that shows up like six different times. She shows up half an hour late to her first day, and brings her dog with without permission because she forgot to walk it. It's like eight different mess ups crammed into one!
-The dog does dog things, chases the cat, knocks water onto the marbelizer (that Prota happens to be wearing) and runs off.
-Prota's brain becomes scrambled, which probably should open up Marbles to some sort of malpractice investigation considering he's testing this prototype invention on a kid who almost certainly didn't know the potential side effects of it. Oh, and he's a cat. Someone might want to look into that to.
-This brings us to the game portion of the game. Essentially, the marbelizer is an invention that is supposed to allow you to make optimal decisions. Unfortunately, by getting your brain scrambled things are now a bit of a mess and you're no longer making good decisions unless you try really, really hard.
-What happens is you'll start a scene and the game goes "hey what do you think about these three questions" and you get taken into a little marble mini-game to answer the questions. Each question has a really bad, a pretty bad, and a pretty good response and you select the one you want by crashing your marble into it. The levels are these little labyrinth type areas and you rotate the screen around using your crank which will cause the marble to move. Crash into bad answers to get the bad ending to the scene, and crash into the good ones to get the "good" ending. There's branching pathways here, but you're free to just sort of roll around and crash into whatever you want.
-I've got mostly complaints from here, sorry. I guess the good thing I'll say is the dialogue is funny sometimes. It usually boils down to 1) you pick the dumb answers 2) Prota gives a dumb response and then 3) the other character in the scene sort of stares at her and asks what the hell is wrong with her brain. Here's a funny example I liked. When Minty (your dog) flees, you go to make a poster and you need to select what paper you'll use for the missing poster, what the poster should say, and then a picture of Minty. So, naturally, I selected an old timey scroll with just the word HELP and a close up picture of Minty's butt. That flashes on the screen and got a good giggle out of me. Good job game.
-The problem is this game is short and some of these choices don't really mean all that much and you're going to need to replay things a lot to get all the endings. Each ending itself takes like maybe an hour, but to get all the checkmarks you'll probably have to play for 15-20 hours. That's too much of this game. Hell, 1 hour is borderline too much for this game.
-I don't really like the marble controls in this game. I want to. I like the concept! But you a lot of small levels that don't require all that much thought and even the "best" ones are kind of unimpressive.
-Also, the marble physics can get weird. They're fine most of the time, but you need to hit each choice three times to actually pick it and if you hit it once gravity gets all weird and the marble can get all floaty.
-Here's something dumb: there's no way to fast forward to a decision point you've already been to. Well, you can skip dialogue. But say you did the bad choice three times in a row and just want to get back to that fourth choice, using the exact same choices as before, to see what one of the other dialogue options would've been to. You have to play through the whole tedious game to get there and it just isn't something that's worth doing for what really is a minimal payoff.
-OH. And also some of these decisions mean jack squat. For example, one level has you dealing with a psychic toddler and you have to guess the answers to his riddles to figure out where Minty might be. Pick the three worse options? You go to the ball museum. The three best options? Ball museum. One best, one ok, one bad? Believe it or not, ball museum. You overcook chicken? Ball museum. Undercook fish? Also ball museum.
-It might not sound like a lot, but it is annoying as hell because it makes the whole central conceit of the game pointless if all you're changing is a couple of lines of meaningless dialogue.
-Also, too many scenes here just aren't that funny. There are some good ones, sure, but there are other ones like where you're talking to a cactus man and trying to read his future that just lead to zero lines of funny dialogue no matter what choices you pick.
I have six endings left to fine and I've been struggling to do so. This is roadblock game number two for me now after Boogie Loops. I'm hoping I can finish this out and move on to stuff I actually want to play because I have a couple of interesting things that I got the past couple of weeks that I haven't been able to start yet.

Time Played: Um. Like 8-10 hours at this point probably. Jeez. That's way too much guys.
High Score: N/A
Beaten? Kinda? I have seen 4 out of 10 endings so far and got a bunch of the chapter endings crossed out too. Not fully though. And I don't count a game as beat until I see everything.
Grade: Like a 3 or 4 out of ten. Not terrible but this is mostly a slog to get through. There is some funny dialogue here but a lot more not funny dialogue and even more tedious marble adventures
Favorite Part So Far: The butt poster. I did literally laugh out loud at that. Good job game.