I finished Mare. I wanted to write a positive write-up to help the devs, given I won it in a giveaway, but… I really can’t do it.
It’s a game with a pretty art style and… yeah that’s it. There is barely no gameplay and barely no story.
About the second point, I’m sure the devs will refer to it as ‘minimalist environmental-driven story’ or some other euphemism to make up some BS about it. The true is there is no dialog, no world building, and also nothing worth mentioning happens for 90% of the game, with the exception of the start, the end, and a point in the middle. More about the story later.
The gameplay is based on clicking some 3-4 hotspots on screen. In fact, that’s how the movement works too, clicking those hotspots to direct yourself there. Around 70% of the game is the equivalent of a walking simulator, where you have go forward, or the solution of what you have to do to go forward is so trivial (just a pair of clicks) that is hard to call it ‘puzzle’. Only the other 30% is slightly more complicated. Here it’s how the puzzles works, and the entire game is like this, there is no variety really: your companion, the little girl, follows you around, but she can’t fly like you, so her path is slightly or very different. So because of that, clicking on point C being on A is different than clicking on point C being on B. So you have to guess the correct order of clicking the hotspots, that serve to guide the little girl. Near the end there is a pair of points that serve to scare the child, instead of attracting her.
That’s it.
So what’s the game about?
You are some kind of magical-steampunk? mechanical bird, some kind of sentry part of an automated defense system? You shot down some aerostatic globes. There is a globe you don’t totally shot down and there is an accident that grounds you with it. From the globe there is a little girl that doesn’t seem to know anything.
Dunno how little girls make up for good explosive ammunition but hey, imagine there is a wizard-alchemist that uses slaves living energy as living bombs or some shit… This, like the rest of the whys you have to make it up on you mind because there is no explanation.
So you advance with the girl through an abandoned city, guiding her.
And here it’s the kicker (what my theory was at 60% of the game)
I don’t think you are guiding the girl, helping her, which is why most people would think looking at the marketing material or taking similar games as reference (ie Ico, The Last Guardian). You are using her, because you need her to open some doors for you. There is a point where if you think about it, you are using her as a bait and have to hold doing nothing while she is attacked to progress. On the next level she doesn’t follow you around, like she lost her trust, in fact, you have to engineer a situation where she is in danger to ‘save’ her and then she starts following you again.
To cement this concept, the devs put on that level a zone where you have to scare away some wild horses to manipulate them to open the doors. The horses are a temporal replacement for the girl. Because… that’s it, that’s what the girl is for you, just like a mare (title drop!), a work horse. A tool that can look beautiful, but that’s it.
and the ending
you were indeed using her, I was right. Because: plot twist: the mechanical bird was possessed by the same (malevolent? is a black smoke tentacle, that’s a visual shortcut for evil right?) entity that were the smoke spirits and the smoke crows. The game shows you a kind of strange flashback of previous areas seen from the pov of the entity, which was looking from the strange orbs you find sometimes. It seems you used the girl to reach a point with a strange device. You attack it by possessing a bigger mechanical entity found in your way, and it finally explodes in a super big (thermonuclear like) explosion.
Obviously it kills the girl. And you? Maybe it doesn’t because you were a spirit? Dunno. The end.
I think there is a secret ending if you do a collecthaton, but I only did 70% of them.
