LogFAQs > #976230690

Game #5 Complete! Lost Your Marbles

Final Thoughts: The more I played this the less I liked it. The best way to play it is to play it for like ten minutes, shut it off, and let the game end on a high note. The three bad choice options in the library (which is the first real level) is far and away the funniest scene of the game. So, check out that scene, turn the game off, and call it a day.

I'm also annoyed because I spent like an extra two hours trying to get the last ending before figuring out I've now locked myself into the "best" ending so I can't see one. Apparently if you unlock all the other endings you get the "special" one which is an incredibly cringey rap which rivals the Scott's Tots episode of The Office for giving me secondhand embarrassment. You're supposed to get an ending based on one of the nine possible paths you can take, but I tried three different ones (including ones I had seen before) and it kept showing me the same ending regardless. So now I have every checkmark in the game but one. Cool. That won't torture my fake OCD.

Speaking of fake choices and endings, it was around the time that I discovered that the game is much smaller than it presents itself and a lot of "choices" here don't matter at all that the game lost a whole point from me. Do the best, middle, or worst ending for the Skate Park or the best, middle, or worst ending from the preschool or the best, middle, or worst ending from the sandwich shop? Doesn't matter, who cares. You're going to the Ball Museum regardless. There's a lot of options here but only two of them really matter and the rest is just shuffling dialogue around.

And the game is occasionally funny, but mostly cringey. It is pretty poorly written and they try to make Prota feel earnest but she really mostly comes off as annoying. "Oh man it must be so cool to have a mom who is a professional wrestler." "Oh yah my dad is super cool as well. He's a preschool teacher." That's some of the absolutely riveting dialogue from the end of the game and there's a lot of stuff like that.

Also Prota kinda sucks. They try to make her quirky but she's more annoying than anything else. The game starts off with Prota being twenty minutes late to work, being forced to walk her dog, and deciding to take her dog to work with her where it attacks the professor (who is a cat) and ruins his invention. Then, at the end of the game, regardless of what decisions you make she takes a two and a half hour nap on the grass and winds up being almost late to the end scene. Everything in the game is her fault and the more I played the game the more I was annoyed by her.

And the more I played the game the less I was charmed by any part of it. The marble mazes are boring, feature weird physics, and there are only a couple here that have any sort of interesting design to them. The dialogue options start feeling lazy and there are really only a couple of scenes (the library, the safety center) that really do a decent job of leaning into the humor. I went through getting every path and more often than not it felt like a complete waste of time for a couple of different lines of dialogue that really weren't all that interesting.

The game also commits the cardinal sin of game design for a game like this and it doesn't let you skip to specific segments. You can skip the dialogue, but you have to do the marble scene over and over again even if you've already unlocked a specific path before. It leads to a lot of redundancy if you want to see all the endings, and the game wasn't good enough to make me want to play it the first time much less the second or third or fourth.

I wasted way too much time on this. I've got a backlog of games now because I was stubborn and refused to move on until I did every pathway for this on the off chance I was missing something good. I wasn't. You won't be. Skip this one.

Should You Play It? No. Like I said, check out up to the library, get the funny endings, and turn it off. You'll save yourself twenty joyless hours.

Final Score: I want to say a high three. It's a bad game but it is almost a "kinda bad" sort of game. Congrats?

Games Completed: 5/90

Game Rankings:
5) Boogie Loops
4) Whitewater Wipeout
3) Lost Your Marbles
2) Casual Birder
1) Crankin's Time Travel Adventure