Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Dear Mariko: Crimson’ and ‘Qavo’
Short shorts.
Dear Mariko is a small narrative created by Coren Baili, an indie developer who focuses on short and ‘sweet’ narratives. This is actually ‘two’ games, with Dear Mariko: Crimson being the expanded version that was created with the help of baka-baru. However, both of them start the same; a pink-haired girl comes home to her beloved, only to find that he is not home. But a letter from him is.
Players will wander around the apartment in order to understand the lives of this couple before making their way in to the bedroom to find the letter. Revealing the beloved has left, she begins wandering around the room with a different outlook on the items and life that she once had.
In the original Dear Mariko, this is the extent of the game — players will make a decision on if they wish to leave the apartment, or continue milling about until an event is triggered. For Crimson, the event that is triggered will then lead players down an epilogue that goes in to more details about the past and future life of our protagonist.
If I’m sounding vague, it’s because the game is short enough that the main spoiler takes up the majority of the talking points. If you don’t want spoilers, ignore the block of text below and skip to the bottom.
Alright, here comes the twist. The game is called Dear Mariko because it is inferred that the protagonist is Mariko; the twist is that she is definitely not Mariko. Upon milling about in the apartment, another individual shows up to ‘break in’. The player can then run to the closet (and/or bathroom in Crimson) and hide. If the player grabbed a knife as well, they will stab the scary intruder, only to reveal that the girl we’ve been playing as is not Mariko, but the stalker Darien has been fearing named Shinku. As with many of these twists, players start to unravel all of the little context clues leading up to this point so that they can go ‘oooh’. Unfortunately for me, I’ve watched enough anime to know that a pink-haired moe-flavoured girl is most likely a ‘yandere’.
What I was not expecting was the epilogue, where it is further revealed that there are actually two yanderes. There is a small note in the base game about a person named ‘Liddy’, which is revealed to possibly be a sibling/close relative to Shinku. Turns out that it is heavily implied that Mariko — the real Mariko and partner to Darien the beloved — killed her. This causes Liddy to ‘haunt’ Shinku to get revenge, which fuels Shinku’s stalker tendencies. Just a full clustertruck of yandere honestly, and definitely has me questioning Darien’s life choices.
If I’m honest, the first twist of the player ‘not being the protagonist they thought they were’ was a bit too obvious thanks to the length and my own experiences. The epilogue adds a boat-load of context that adds much more depth to the plot than the simple twist that it had going before.
While I cannot state with confidence that I understood every little detail — especially in the epilogue which doubles the amount of endings and contextual clues — Dear Mariko: Crimson easily achieves its goal of making a bite-sized story. The artistic upgrade between versions is stellar, and the music is ridiculously catchy for something so relaxing. If you have a few minutes you too can find out just what Mariko is hiding.
Qavo is a puzzle game by Masen Sodki, a software developer and game dev hobbyist in Sweden. Players are an adorable little square just trying to find their way to the exit of each stage in an increasingly hostile (yet aesthetically pleasing) environment.
The core of Qavo is that the player needs to reach a gear that reveals where the door has been hiding this whole time, so that they can leave. Levels are split in to boxed rooms, which exits at various locations depending on the room. If the doors are aligned with another room (such as the above photo) then players can switch from their current room to the other room with no problems. Some times rooms contain levers which can be walked over to activate them, altering other rooms in the space by moving walls, creating bridges, and more.
Where things get spicy is the second level, where players are introduced to the ‘X’ button. Upon pressing it, the camera zooms out to reveal that all of the rooms are within a larger box, and the little box character can no longer move. Instead, the arrows will slide the rooms themselves around based on which ones can move. For example, if the empty space is in the top right, pressing ‘UP’ will cause the bottom right room to move in to the empty space, while pressing ‘RIGHT’ instead will move the top left. This creates almost two puzzles in one, as the rooms are treated like the sliding picture puzzles that the player needs to line up constantly to allow the box avatar to maneuver throughout the levels. Nothing about the rooms can change during this phase, so all of them can be moved without worry.
Combining these two skills together creates an oddly mesmerizing experience. The tutorial itself is fantastic in its use of guiding players through imagery and free trial, and not once do you feel as if the game is really ‘telling’ you anything. The closest is a massive ‘X’ on the back wall, and immediately you can figure out what the game wants you to do — it even works on keyboard AND controller! Who knew it could be so easy? Nevertheless, it isn’t the hardest puzzle game in the world, but it is definitely one to try out if you love simple aesthetics and cleverly designed layered puzzles.
