This review was originally written on 09/06/2018.
Technical Information
Developer: Point Bleep Studios
Publisher: Flying Interactive
Release Date: Oct 19, 2017
The Mind of Marlo is a point-and-click in the form of a documentary, telling the story of a young man who has a very rare disease that makes his head change shape every X minutes. Bothered by this problem, Marlo seeks a doctor to solve it and try to have a normal life.
Final Thoughts – Analyzing the game as a whole
Graphics and UI
The pixel art is simple and well done.
Marlo’s mouth moves when he speaks, and his eyes blink too. It’s one of those simple but polished games.
The UI is easy to understand and use, plus it gives you the option to apply (or remove) a filter that makes it look like you’re watching the game through a camcorder lens.
The inventory is in a bottom bar: when you select it, a caption appears informing you of the name of the selected object and where you can interact with it.
Soundtrack and Sound Effects
Neutral music, but all dialogues are voice-acted. The voice work turned out really cool.
Gameplay
Great gameplay! You can speed up dialogues by holding down the spacebar or simply clicking anywhere on the screen to advance to the next sentence.
The game is extremely short and has a hell of a mind-blowing moment (at least it was for me! lol).
Your actions are very intuitive and offer almost no challenge.
The dialogues are humorous, and the gameplay is very relaxed.
Even though the story is a bit bizarre, I liked the idea. They should have explored it more, they could have included several other items for the player to interact with and gradually discover more about Marlo’s life.
The biggest flaw of this game is that it’s short! :/
Replayability and Game Retention
The story is very short and doesn’t have multiple endings or anything that justifies a second playthrough right away.
It’s the kind of game you play once for the experience and the “mind-blowing” twist, and then maybe revisit years later when you’ve forgotten the details.
