This is the two hundred nineteenth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Our two hundred nineteenth random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality has written us a letter. It’s Dear Mariko, by Coren Baili, and its tagline in the bundle reads:

A girl comes home to find a letter.

This is, indeed, what happens.

Dear Mariko was made with RPG Maker, but it’s not a role-playing game. It’s more of an adventure game with bits of visual novel, not dissimilar to our 215th random selection, Escaped Chasm. But where Escaped Chasm impressed with its high quality art and slick production, Dear Mariko is a simpler affair. There are the usual RPG Maker foibles, like launching in a small window by default and only entering fullscreen mode with the semi-secret ALT + ENTER keyboard shortcut, and unclear controls (the arrow keys to move and ENTER or C to interact with stuff). But there’s also the stock RPG Maker tilesets and menus making up most of the art. I believe the character portraits are original, as are a few special event “CGs” (full screen illustrations) that display at key moments, but mostly this looks like the vast majority of RPG Maker games out there.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But Dear Mariko also has somewhat clumsy writing. I believe that English is not Coren Baili’s first language (a Spanish version is also offered), so I can forgive some clunkiness in the line-to-line writing. But I’m less sympathetic to the strange overarching premise. It opens with a description of an idyllic romance, before hinting that something seems to have gone wrong. That something, naturally, is the subject of the titular letter that players will find shortly after starting the game, sending things into horror territory. But it doesn’t make much sense. Soon enough it became apparent that this is all in service of a key plot twist that subverts player expectations, and which seems to be the entire point of this very short game. Except, I didn’t even find this twist my first time through. Instead, I ended up with the “bad ending”, which seemed to play the weird scenario mostly straight, and left me puzzled as to what the game was trying to say.

Fortunately, by restarting and poking around the house a bit more, I was able to find two more endings, including the “true ending” which finally revealed the twist. This was kind of cool, but I’m not sure if it justified the awkward structure of the game. I also learned, after playing, that it leans rather heavily on some anime tropes with which I was unfamiliar. The original release of Dear Mariko only had these three endings to find, but the bundle also contains the Crimson version which, in addition to updated art, has an epilogue section after players find the original true ending. It actually takes place before the main game, and adds some mysterious framing to the events. According to the itch.io page, there are four more endings to be found in the epilogue, but I only found two.

Part of me was curious to see what the others might contain, but honestly it was getting annoying to keep restarting things. Players must create manual saves, and if I foolishly saved over an earlier one, then I had to start the whole thing over to go back and try something else. That means repeating a lot of dialogue and events, something that most visual novels accommodate with chapter selections and fast-forward options. Not so here, sadly. Finding different endings in Dear Mariko is a matter of interacting with different objects and collecting a few key items before other story events occur, but in the epilogue it seemed I’d tried every possible interaction, leaving me at a loss as to how to find the other endings. Eventually I decided I didn’t care enough to keep looking.

I feel a bit unfair lodging so many complaints about such a short game, though. It really takes just a few minutes to reach one of Dear Mariko’s endings, and fans of anime and horror may be intrigued enough by its twist to consider those minutes well spent. For those who missed the bundle, the original version of Dear Mariko is sold for any price you wish to pay, including free, while the Crimson edition requires a minimum payment of $3.50. Some may feel that’s worth it, but for me it’s much easier to recommend Escaped Chasm.

That’s 219 down, and only 1522 to go!