Aww heck, I never posted about Marble Nest! Let’s talk about Marble Nest. We played it, we got all four endings, there were a couple things I maybe wanted to try but we didn’t but that’s okay, it would be pretty easy to replay. A couple thoughts.
As a player character, Daniil makes for a very very different playstyle than Artemy. It’s wild how all the actual mechanics of the game can be the same and yet such slight tweaks can change the feeling of the game so much. Like how everyone talking to you but how almost no one trading with you makes the whole town seem completely different.
Daniil sees the town as a chessboard and Artemy sees it as a body. This Daniil seems to know a lot fewer people than Artemy knew.
The pacing is also very interesting. The whole “time to make your nightly rounds” thing, is that something Daniil does? Is that part of his gameplay loop?
Coming out of having just finished Pathologic 2, wherein everyone’s constantly bitching at and/or trying to kill Artemy every four seconds, playing as Daniil felt like a fucking power trip. People are like “hey can you do this please” and I’m like “…wait can I do this? I can just do this??”
I think overall I prefer playing as Artemy, although maybe I was just more accustomed to it.
No seriously, when playing Pathologic, I felt kind of bad about continually dragging Daniil because deep down there was always this little part of me that was like “you know he’s just trying his best, same as you, he doesn’t deserve all this shit you’re throwing at him” but now that I’ve gotten to walk a mile in his shoes I can definitively say that he absolutely deserved all of the shit I was throwing at him, and also I think Artemy deserved to punch him once. (After that they can go back to being friends/lovers/colleagues, however you interpret them, but he should get to punch him once.)
Okay enough about Artemy, he’s didn’t even appear in this game.
Wait one last thing, in the list of townsfolk it showed Artemy as having a name rather than being called “Haruspex”, but in the main game Daniil was listed as “Bachelor”?
God, that list. Seeing so many dead kids. :( Daniil you did not protect my children. Oh, Mark Immortell was there and was in danger, in the Bachelor route am I allowed to let him die from the plague, is that a thing I can do, please? My besties Lara, Bad Grief, and Victor were also dead, but Stakh was alive! I tried to visit him but I couldn’t, the game doesn’t let you cross the river even if you go alllllll the way around it. I tried to find Aglaya too but couldn’t.
Seeing the town map was so heartbreaking. Quarantining the stone yard and letting everyone else die is a pretty pragmatic decision bUT ALSO!!!!!! My KIDS.
The loop was neat, how everyone kept saying you were dead and how you didn’t know why until the end, and I loved how the town kind of was your body. (Do the fires mean you’re feverish? Does the cold mean you’re dying?) This game has always been excellent about how it nests themes within themes and symbols within symbols, and Marble Nest was no exception.
Kind of hilarious tho how the ultimate theme is “if you don’t want your favorite character to die, just stop reading the book, or maybe start over and reread the parts where they’re still alive forever.” Turns out you really can beat death Daniil, good job. :)
(“But wait! I may be a fictional character, but the disease which kills me is also fictional! AU in which it’s not real fuck you” Honestly what did I expect coming from the same people who had a plot-critical messenger murdered offscreen by the understudy of the protagonist.)
This character’s themes seem to be very lofty. Again, I think I vibed more with the more grounded side of things, but I love metafuckery so you know.
That time I was in that house and I was like “I might need to check out some rooms” and the other guy was like “here, I have the master key” and hands me a lockpick, I actually laughed. Incredible.
The PANTOMIME. God that was such a vibe. Compared to everything else in Pathologic, it was so animated! I do love the “you’re heartless, come back to me when you have a heart” and then in the next loop I hand them a human heart and they’re like “…..dude, have you ever heard of a fucking metaphor, holy shit why are you giving me this.”
The CLOAK. The MASK. The S A N D A L S. Hhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Wearing the ensemble and literally being immune to the plague zone, I was like “wow this is fucking op how is this even allowed” although I guess Marble Nest was also written so that you can last the whole game on literally one piece of toast.
It was so weird to go around places where I know twyre grows and not hear any bugs. I did take a nice incredibly long walk through the steppe just to see how far the game would let me go though, because it was nice and pretty and who the fuck has time for that while in Pathologic?
I didn’t really talk much before with Georgiy Kain, but fuuuuuuck what is wrong with that guy? If Daniil’s been hanging out with him, I can fucking understand why he became obsessed with the polyhedron at the end.
And Aspity, oh god I have so many questions, what are you, I don’t think we ever cleared that up.
And Shrew! What’s her deal?? There were actually a lot of very memorable NPC’s who didn’t even have their own custom designs.
I don’t know much about Pathologic 1 but I think Eva killed herself in the Bachelor route? Does that mean she’s going to die in this Bachelor route if it ever comes out? I mean presumably Marble Nest already deviates from that game quite a bit since I don’t think Artemy dies in it (and I don’t think Daniil does either.)
Gee Daniil! How come your mom lets you have two funerals?
A little sad Changeling never came by to say hi, I would have liked to see her. Although I guess she’s busy trying to save my ass irl. I know I remembered seeing the steam page for Marble Nest earlier and being like “huh that’s sort of a strange poster for the game, isn’t Artemy supposed to be dead?” And then I played it and I just took a moment and turned to my sister and was like “hey look at this” and she was like “…yup that’s literally the game.”
Overall it was a fun time. Very short comparatively, very clever.
