MAGGIE’S APARTMENT — THERE’S STILL A CHANCE SHE MIGHT BE GAY
by Frosty
GAME: Maggie’s Apartment
TIME TO COMPLETE: 2/3 HOURS
PLATFORM: PC
(SPOILER WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SOME VAGUE SPOILERS FOR THE GAME’S END.)
Maggie’s Apartment is a good game. The art is gorgeous. The sound design is stellar. The whole premise is really smart. But the end left me disappointed and hungry for things that could have (and maybe should have) been.
I’m hesitant to suggest writing solutions for stories because I don’t want to insinuate that my creative directions or ideas are somehow better. Most media could use some fixes to its writing, and all audiences will have a different response to things. Sometimes what I view as poor writing is recognized by critics as strong writing. And sometimes that difference in opinion comes down to me being unhappy with a story not going in the direction I wanted it to go. So I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to judge the story beats Maggie’s Apartment actually delivers against the story beats I expected it to deliver. That’s a poor way to judge games and media in general!
However, the end of the game is frustrating enough for me that I feel like discussing its weaknesses is a worthy enough cause. So here we go.
Maggie’s Apartment is a simple point and click mystery game hinged on the premise of discovering the truth behind a relationship within the confines of a single room. It’s a dialogue heavy game with lots of really quirky and fun writing. There’s some really good world building and really laugh-out-loud moments. The sound design is splendid, filled with great ambient sounds and music and hammy, layered voice performances. The art is lovely, soft and squishy and very reminiscent of illustrations from children’s books.
You play Maggie Mallowne a young woman living in a secret apartment with her even more secret boyfriend, world famous popstar, Randy Rosebud. When Randy leaves Maggie alone in the apartment for a gig and the entire building is put on lockdown for inspection soon after, Maggie decides to spend her day doing what any woman does… listening to her neighbors and thinking about her boyfriend.
The objective of the game is to uncover the truth of Maggie and Randy’s life, but it’s an objective the player is meant to find on their own. It’s a game of pondering and putting puzzle pieces together while exploring a very limited scope of the world. It all has a very slice of life, relaxed feel, as if the actual plot is playing second banana to the mood of the game. You’re meant to immerse yourself in the feeling of Maggie’s Apartment and worry about the story second.
Though interaction with other characters is mostly done through the walls, there are a few exceptions. One such exception, a character that Maggie can actually see and directly interact with, is Beauty the Radish, a human sized radish with an eyepatch and single tooth. She lives on Maggie’s balcony, and she and Randy do not get along, mostly due to the implied unreciprocated feelings Beauty harbors for Maggie. She and Maggie have an interesting dynamic. It’s obvious Beauty cares deeply for Maggie, and the two of them have been together for a long time and care for each other deeply. They’re good friends, though it’s clear that Beauty wishes she and Maggie could have a much closer relationship. After all, Beauty’s greatest goal in life is to… be eaten… by Maggie. She spends her days on Maggie’s balcony sitting by a grill and waiting for Maggie to decide to eat her.
Maggie doesn’t want to eat Beauty. She clearly cares about her a lot and wants the two of them to get along, despite Randy’s presence, which has driven a wedge between the two women.
There’s something so real and true and close to my life about Maggie and Beauty’s tentative almost-romance. Beauty is in love with her best friend and can’t stand her boyfriend because he’s not good enough for Maggie and never will be. She’s the better match for her friend. That’s an experience that I think a lot of gay people relate to. A lot of us have experienced the same unreciprocated feelings and intense jealousy that Beauty experiences. When I was in high school I was in love with a straight best friend for a time, and even though I realized it way too late, it still hurts to think about just how pathetic that period in my life was, how consumed with jealousy and confusion I was. It’s hard to see Beauty call Maggie pet names and raise her eyebrows suggestively and wait, wait, wait on Maggie’s balcony. A lot of us have been in Beauty’s place.
It’s an especially painful story to watch unfold because you know Beauty isn’t going to get what she wants from Maggie, and Maggie will never understand.
And that’s my biggest problem with this story.
It feels like Maggie and Beauty should have been explored more. It would have actually allowed Maggie to develop as a character and moved this story more in the direction of a thriller romance than a weirdly disappointing detective story. There’s a lot of build up between Maggie and Beauty that never really gains momentum. You’re left to stew in a sad, unrequited love. It feels like there’s so much more to their relationship, and it kind of pisses me off that the big reveal of the story (which I don’t want to ruin too much) leads to Beauty’s demise. She and Maggie don’t get any sort of closure. That stings.
Maybe I shouldn’t have expected that closure when I first played this game. Maybe it was too hopeful for me to believe Beauty would confess and Maggie would realize exactly how much she cares for her friend, kind of like Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls music video. The writing quality of this game is just so consistently good and charming and nuanced that I guess I expected better than falling back on a boring trope like killing off a visible WLW for the sake of another (dubiously straight) woman’s happiness.
I don’t know. There’s something missing here that just leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth.
Maggie’s Apartment has a great soundtrack filled to the brim with songs sung by Randy Rosebud, and they each play at certain cues in the story. My favorite is Happy Go Randy Me, a song about Randy seducing Maggie. My favorite part of the song is a line where Randy croons, “there’s still a chance she might be gay,” which I interpret as a jab toward Maggie and Beauty’s complex relationship, a relationship that is keeping Randy on his toes and worried.
It’s a far cry from Beauty’s Song, a saccharine little ballad where Beauty affirms that she’s always meant to be with Maggie, that she’ll die again and again for her, and will always remain with her no matter what.
There’s so much that could be said about these two women and what they actually mean to one another. There’s so many ways Maggie could have developed as a character if her relationship with Beauty had taken less of a backseat to her relationship with Randy.
Maybe that’s my big hang up with the climax of this game. Beauty and Maggie both deserve better. I don’t think it’s naive or childish to want that for these characters. I feel let down that Maggie doesn’t develop more, that she doesn’t really get over Randy.
The lack of development is almost like a betrayal to the rest of the fantastic writing in Maggie’s Apartment.
This is a fun game, a cute game, a short little game that I’m sure I’ll revisit one day. I don’t regret playing it. In fact, I really encourage everyone to give it a go. But there’s a few critical moments of this game where the writing sometimes falls short of my expectations, and it pains me to think about what might have been.
Would Maggie’s Apartment have been better if Maggie explored her feelings for Beauty more? Maybe. I don’t know. I’d like to think that it would have been a more touching game at least. I’d like to think it would have given Maggie some actual, tangible character development. I’d like to think it would have made the tragedy of Beauty’s feelings a lot less relatable and painful.
As it stands, all I can really do is accept that the only thing I’m ever going to get in the way of canon Maggie x Beauty (What’s their ship name? Baggie?) content is that short line Randy sings through Maggie’s crackly old radio: There’s still a chance she might be gay.
It’s not much, but it’s something.
