Hello and welcome. Today I'd like to talk about a
game I'm willing to bet you haven't heard of it's a game called Marrow. it's an indie Metroidvania
game on steam, and as you can see it hasn't had the most sterling career. It came out in 2016,
and at the time of making this video, it's 63 percent positive with only 22 reviews. There
are zero people playing it right now and it boasts an all-time peak of three concurrent players. So
is it a good game? Hmm well, It's complicated. I was on the fence about making this video but if i
don't talk about it who will? I feel like i had a divine visitation, like it's my duty to talk
about this game or something bad will happen. Now Marrow does bill itself as a horror game,
so if you don't have your mom's permission, uh... Don't close the video because I need the
engagement, but maybe just close your eyes or something. Anyway the game starts with this
text, "Awaken in the Nightmare." which feels a little on the nose but I'm not going to nitpick
pretty much the only line in the entire game. So you wake up or, "awaken" to a house filled
with empty beds but no one else around. You head downstairs only to find it just as deserted and a
strange hole in the ground. Standing before it you can see these images flash and might notice that
they appear suspiciously similar to the figures on the start menu. With nothing else to do, you head
into the basement and find a tunnel which you can crawl through. This is the start of the game. Your
name is Daniel—though I had to beat the game to figure that one out—and all of your friends have
suddenly vanished in the middle of the night. Now the game doesn't tell you any of this,
you're just expected to suss it out for yourself. The first thing you'll notice about
this game is that it's extremely dark, and I don't mean that just in tone. I
recommend playing this game in a dark room, not necessarily because of the atmosphere,
but because it's easier to see the screen. Basically all you're doing here is getting
used to the controls. The platforming is simple and responsive. It doesn't have any weird
delays, you have full strafe control midair, and the gravity feels appropriate. Also these
weird things keep appearing for one frame Down here is where you encounter your first
enemy; this green thing with no arms. And if you get close it screams at you. There's no
way of attacking it so we gotta go around. We go down here, take some fall damage, and come
to an impassable wall. Fortunately there's a switch right below. It also subtly shows that
those glowing flies are there to help you. Going through the wall we come to a strange
statue which we soon realize is a save point. And it does that every time you save. Then
there's some platforming over enemies that are barely visible, and then that leads to this.
Yes it's a weapon. There is combat in this game. But giving you a clumsy weapon is pretty standard
in horror games. It generally encourages running away from monsters instead of fighting them.
In the next area there's some wall crawlers straight out of Metroid. These platforms are
half transparent, but if we go down here and hit a switch a timer activates. Then we can climb
up and get the first health upgrade. Except it's not called health, it's called grit. And it's blue
instead of red. This is only the beginning. The combat is straightforward, if a little janky.
You just click and you attack. That's it. Now I'd like to introduce the main combat strategy
in this game. It's something I'd like to call ABJ: Always Be Jumping. Standing on the ground locks
you into an attack animation, but if you're airborne you can strafe, and when you touch the
ground it cancels your attack animation so you can attack again sooner. Anyway down here is an
extremely dark room. You can't see anything. So we don't go there, we go this way there's this statue
that holds an amulet. We grab it, and as you can see, it makes the area much brighter. Going back,
it's still dark as hell, but we can see more. And that's basically all the mechanics. Now the
question becomes, why is it rated so poorly? It's not the best looking game sure, but it's got a
distinct style that was enough to get me to buy it in the first place, and the controls aren't
terrible, at least by my standards. I've seen worse games on steam, so why? Well the mystery
starts to unravel once you leave this tutorial area. The game opens up, more paths appear, and
then you realize you have no map. Okay you can live with that, but then you take some damage and
start wondering where your health is. And there it is, but now it's gone. I had to press F to see
it, but if I press it again nothing happens. Guess what? That was the only time I'm allowed to look
at my health. Not until I get to another save room at least. That's right, checking your health is
a limited resource. Also, there's no start menu, and there's not even a way to pause. Plus the only
way to heal is to save. Bizarre as these design choices are, I don't think they're deal breakers,
but the mystery is starting to unravel. Anyway we go up here and we find this. This is one of the 13
orphans, or at least their soul I guess. They're hidden all throughout the game, but fortunately
there's a sound cue to tell you when one's nearby. And any game wanting to be like Metroid
needs the obscure hidden power-ups. So I get that and die soon after. I'm back at the save point, and that
means I need to run all the way back, but that thing I just picked up?
Well I need to go get it again. Unlike most modern games, anything you pick up
is lost unless you save after grabbing it. It was pretty standard in older games but these days I'd
say the practice has mostly fallen out of favor. By the way that red number is my magic yep
they're reversed, and it's called clarity instead. Now we enter the next area called Windheim. Or not because i ran into an enemy
that's practically invisible. So I'm back here again, and that means, you
guessed it, I need to get the collectibles again. Remember when I said that horror games generally
make combat clumsy in order to discourage fighting? Well in Marrow it is absolutely
necessary. The combat is a core mechanic, so you better practice your ABJ. According to
the steam store page, this whole game takes place inside of a mountain. Anyway at the bottom
we come to this pool of not blood, but the titular substance "marrow" and then there's this thing
which warps us here. It's this game's form of quick travel and that means backtracking. All of
this game's design choices are not unintentional. The lack of a map could possibly be dismissed as
laziness, but the fact that checking your health was made a limited resource displays a willful
deviation from gaming convention. The original Metroid and Metroid 2 had no map, but it was
probably due to hardware limitations considering a mapping system was added in Super Metroid.
Now the 2014 game Subnautica doesn't have a map, and neither do the Dark Souls games, so there is
a precedent in favor of missing or limited maps. The goal is to make the player feel lost,
confused, to force them to engage with the world on a deeper level. But confusion can quickly
turn to irritation and even when handled well, there will always be players lost to this
approach, and clearly Marrow lost a lot of people. But that alone I don't think is enough, and
then this happens. You're trapped so you try to attack it but you just take damage. Whatever this
thing is it clearly doesn't like you very much. And then these appear you might remember
seeing them briefly at the beginning. Whoever they are they're here to help. Undeterred we continue on. In spite of
Marrow's low play count and ratings, I don't think the lack of a map was the cause. It's
not impossible to find your way around without it, and it does lend itself to the atmosphere.
Also, not displaying the health does clear up the screen, which helps immersion. But it is
difficult to defend it being a limited resource. For what it's worth not knowing your health
does add some element of tension, but that is what i like to call a Pyrrhic victory.
No I think the real problem lies elsewhere. Then you hear that scream from before and a bunch
of red stuff starts chasing you up the screen. If you were wondering whether or
not it's an instant kill, it is. So the second time around I don't suck nearly
as much, but as you can see, platforming is a major part of this game. Fortunately the controls
aren't bad and it does feel like your fault when you screw up. If you survive the Familiar's crazy
kool-aid climb, you'll be treated to a new area—oh yeah that thing's called the familiar by the way
another thing you'll only learn at the end of the game. There's nothing to the left but a bunch
of whispering voices, so we'd better go right. Obviously it's some kind of graveyard. So we go in here and we're immediately dropped
into a huge room. There's narrow platforms, these spinning blades keep spawning underneath you, and
there's things crawling everywhere. There's spikes on the floor and you'd better hope you went to
the left first and ended up hitting this switch, because if you went much deeper without it you're
in for a world of confusion. Oh yeah, and see this this easy to miss switch I can't press? Who knows
why I can't press it, but you'd better remember it. And after that platforming we come in here and
learn that this area is called the Honored Refuse, and given that it's filled with coffins
I'm sure you can guess who's the refuse. So the game's a little cryptic, sure but that's
not the real reason the game is rated so poorly; it's because it's hard. Once you reach this area
all the pieces start coming together the game's cryptic, and it's hard. The game's confusing,
and it's hard. It's got no map and it's hard. See the pattern? All of these things on their own
would have been manageable, but combine that with a high difficulty and we finally get the whole
picture. Individually the encounters in this game aren't that difficult, but you're eventually
going to take damage, and it'll whittle you down room by room by room. And then you'll die
without ever finding out what's at the end, and then you'll just sit in the save room
and realize you need to do it all over again. So yeah mystery solved. Anyway after wandering
around we come to this passageway that looks suspiciously like an exit, but the flies are all
red and there's this weird noise too. Sure enough, try to walk past the grave and we're immediately
put down to one hp. So that's not it. What we really want to do is go down this tube filled with
coffins, avoid the infinitely spawning enemies, and make it all the way to here without taking too
much damage. This glowing totem is the answer and when we touch it the screen goes all weird and
suddenly we're a weird frog tadpole thing being attacked endlessly by flying fetus things. The
game calls this the echo realm, and when you're like this you can't attack, only jump around and
try not to die. If you manage not to die you'll come up somewhere familiar. You're presented with
two ways to go, and hopefully you'll choose left first. Now we're back in the first room except
it's even harder to see and we can't attack. If you've remembered that switch, good job,
because we can only press it when we're in this form. Now we need to do a blind jump. The lack
of vision makes this a little tough. We make it the second time though. Now we go to the right
and up so we drop through this thing that changes us back. And the game drops us off right in the
area before that invisible thing over the grave. it might seem like the game's trying
to tell you to go that way, but don't. What you really opened up was somewhere else, and
more importantly, go save, because if you die now you'll need to do that whole thing over again. So
now we can go this way, crawl under all this crap, and finally kill this big thing at the top
so we can get back into the echo realm. This will allow us to go to that grave while being
inside the echo realm. It's full of eyes and now we can see just what it was that was blocking our
way. It'll still kill us, but fortunately the echo realm allows us to go underneath it. And that's
that area. We're rewarded with another save room. And then there's this area it's got a fountain
and some statues it was probably nice once. We see a dead person who is suspiciously not
malformed and we learned that this place is called the Stuland Manor, a new place
for us to roam around and get lost in. There's a conundrum on our hands. There's about
a million reasons for me to hate this game, but i don't. So this is gonna take some
examination. One question is what does it mean to be good? Well if you look it up on
google you'll get about a billion definitions, but we're going to be focusing on the first,
"something inherently desirable or agreeable." In the context of video games, that would make
it something entertaining or engaging. Now what constitutes good is a broad topic which would fall
under the purview of your conundrums of axiology, which is beyond the scope of this video. But i
don't think I'm going to start any fires when I say that "good" is a subjective term. What one
finds entertaining another might find frustrating. If you look at any rating aggregation site,
be it steam, rate your music, or my anime, list you will invariably come across people who
don't like what you like. Believe it or not, there's even people who don't like my videos.
Even your favorite album will have its detractors. Lower life forms they may be, the point still
stands. There isn't anything universally agreed upon as good. A rating is really just a Gaussian
distribution, or, the chance that you'll be in the group that thinks it's good. However even though
97 percent of people on steam think Factorio is good, that doesn't mean 97 of humanity would share
this opinion even though they SHOUL—What it really means is that of the people already predisposed to
purchase Factorio, of those who bothered to review it, 97 percent think it's worth recommending. It's
a form of sampling bias. Everything is biased. And while it does point towards the game being good,
it's still inherently biased. So if reviews are biased, we can look at sales. But WII sports
is the fourth best-selling game of all time, and i don't think many people are going to argue
that it's the fourth best game of all time. While total sales and aggregate scores are
excellent at pointing you towards things that are generally found good by other people,
they're by no means a guarantee for you, or even in general. You know, I don't even know
why I bothered saying all that when I could have just shown you THIS. According to popularity and
ratings, this "game" is superior to Marrow. This. Oh~ I guess when people say a picture is
worth a thousand words this is what they mean. Ultimately though, good is still subjective.
Anyway, we're going through this area, get jump scared by this guy, and ultimately die to a
drip in the ceiling so now I need to do it again. We practice our ABJ on this faceless jumping
swordfoot thing, rescue the crusty skull from the swarm of weird skull flies, and avoid
dying to the giant instant kill monster. You know... Normal stuff. Then we
meet this guy again and we're back. Over here we grab what looks like a clarity
upgrade, but it's actually our first magic spell. There's also this thing
stuck to the ceiling, clearly not having a good time. Something interesting
I noticed is that the sounds it makes... ...are the same as the ones you'll hear above
this pool of marrow in the Honored Refuse. Just something interesting. I do think this
game has some very cool monster designs. Anyway, with the flame burst, now we can light
these torches and also destroy these yellow walls, which the game successfully clues you in on. It's
used mostly for solving a variety of puzzles, but you can also use it against enemies,
though stabbing them is usually better. Now we're exploring the upstairs and here we
come across that guy again staring out a window. Thanks to my keen gamer
instincts, I find this area. In this game, you're going to
want every upgrade you can find. In here we find more of those faceless things,
and as you can see, ABJ is so powerful, even the enemies use it. I'm sure these chalkboards are
interesting for lore reasons but I've got other things to worry about. Another quirk of this
game is that some enemies can look the same, but have wildly different behaviors. These
guys are about a medium level of bounce while this guy goes absolutely mental. I hate
this guy, I really do. I mean it! I hate him! Anyway your reward for defeating the boss
is the ability to light this fireplace, which damages you, because of course it
does. But it also lets us go in here, and do our eyes deceive? Yes,
yes it is. It's a weapon upgrade! This rapier has twice the damage and
twice the range of our old dagger, although it seems something is less than happy
about that because the house is trying to stab us. Remember to save. And I totally did this on my
first try. It's not like i died to that jumping guy three times. In here we've got this fancy
bedroom and another fireplace to light which, guess what, does damage. There's also this
skeleton in the bed and when you try to leave there's a ton of enemies that spawned in
your path. Fortunately the upgraded sword makes this a lot easier. Around the top of the manor you
find a mirror, and you just stare at it for a bit. You stab it, and then try some other stuff, and
then you realize that the answer actually was stabbing it, just in the right place. It leads you
in here to this weird psychedelic mirror realm. I don't like how it looks in here, but now it's
time for me to introduce another quirk of this game. Remember when I said that two enemies can
look the same but have different behaviors? Well they can also have different amounts of health
too. This one takes three hits to kill, while this other one took five. Yep, you heard right.
It's an interesting design choice to be sure, but I can see the logic behind wanting to
fake you out in a horror game like that, because most things have predictable amounts
of health, but you never really know. Anyway I've been talking too long with this
place as the backdrop. We get to the top and find an upgrade for our amulet which makes
everything brighter and thank god for that. Now we can see the whole screen, albeit faintly.
Also there's an orphan over here but I'm getting out of this place. After upgrading our amulet and
weapon, there's one more upgrade left to get here. After lighting all the fireplaces we can
get this earring which reduces the amount of damage we take. Highly recommended
and yes it does show up on our model. Hmm... Welcome to the first boss of Marrow—sorry, I mean
second boss. This is probably the only thing that actually startled me. The way it just pops in
immediately, it's just... It's just great. This is the Patriarch, and the blades he summons might
look familiar I also have on good authority that the skeleton in that bed is supposed to be him,
which means this is his discarnate spirit or something. He has three attacks: summoning blades,
making rocks fall from the ceiling, and shooting some glowing bouncing orb out of his forehead.
Visually the boss looks great, but this is where it gets a little stinky. The screen is too dark
to see the rocks falling from the ceiling before they hit you and there's no warning when the orb
is going to shoot out and bean you in the face. Combine that with the fact that you need to be
jumping to hit him which makes it difficult to dodge and you have a boss that's about 50 percent
skill and 50 percent luck. So inevitably you're going to die, but the save points right there
so you don't really have an excuse to give up. All that said, the boss isn't actually that hard.
You just gotta hit him in the forehead 50 times. After you hit him 25 times you get a second
phase, which is basically the same except all the attacks are faster. And then he dies.
I highly recommend going to the left and saving before going right. We meet this guy
again and he tells us to go over here. Now we're in the reservoir, but the reservoir of
what? Well, marrow. It's probably about time I explained it. according to the lore, marrow
is what happens "when the universe bleeds." Basically it's a substance created by tearing
reality and has strange mutagenic properties which explains the reservoir, the labs
inside the manor, the overfilled graveyard, and all the weird monsters running about.
There's clearly some thought put into the world. It's trying to tell a story in a
hands-off approach, which I appreciate. Its visual style is the best thing it has going
for it, and there is a method to its madness, but it would have benefited from some more upfront
clues. Most of what I just said were only things I figured out after playing through the entire
game, and if you don't read the store page you'd have no idea what's going on. Though at the end
of the day, the setting is what kept me going. Over here we have a very important item called
the luminous orb. We're going to need this to solve several puzzles, and the game congratulates
you for finding such an important item by shooting you in the face. Anyway, if we hold C and press
directions we can change the color of the orb, and if we match the colors correctly,
we can reflect this thing's projectiles. Remembering which direction which
color goes to is a bit of a pain. The fly over there seems to resonate
with our color and produces sound. I'm sure it's important for lore reasons,
but more importantly it's for puzzle reasons. After we kill that thing, a passage opens up,
which allows us to get back into the manor. And that's pretty useful because there's
this psychedelic bathroom over here. Walking in any further hurts us,
but if we listen to the sounds and replicate them with our orb, this happens... Once again, our reward is
getting attacked. Anyway—deal with that and we found another orphan.
Now I might as well take this time to use these warp gates and unlock some of
the areas that were inaccessible before. Like this area here that had a previously
impassable chasm, but if you noticed the blinking light in the background you might remember to
come back here once you get the orb. Once again, there's another orphan. Over here's an area
that we needed the flame burst to get through. There's some platforming in the echo realm and
guess what's at the top it's another orphan. This time though we gain a spell called grit
regain. It allows us to use our magic to heal ourselves, and while I'm not complaining, it means
our magic pool is now essentially our health pool. So from a gameplay standpoint, that means that
using magic to hurl fireballs essentially deals us one damage so guess what we won't be
using outside of puzzles? Here's some invisible enemies that you can only see if you
tap the orb. This game is full of surprises. Oh yeah, I forgot. There's also a back dash move,
but it's literally only useful for damage boosting through enemies. So previously we talked about
how good is subjective, and while that is true, that doesn't mean that every person has their own
wildly unique idea of good. We're all human... I... assume. So broadly speaking, our brains
all work the same. Generally you'll see people self-segregating around genres, so you'll have
something like the guy who prefers role-playing games, the guy who prefers first-person shooters,
or the guy at work who will bring up Skyrim then look confused if you bring up Oblivion. To the
individual, the concept of good often becomes a question of which of those clusters the game
falls under. This is perhaps a little reductive, but not unreasonable I don't think, and an
individual can overlap with several clusters. As for Marrow, its cluster is apparently weirdos
like me, which is an admittedly small market. Having said that, I'd also like to touch on the
topic of what you could consider "objectively good." Things that are good regardless
of personal tastes. I suppose the most foundational example would be something that does
not cause pain, so the crazy bus theme is out. In the context of this game, something objectively
good would be that it plays a sound cue when you hit a switch to let you know a passage opened up.
Graphical fidelity is probably also objectively good, but that breaks into a whole topic of cost
benefit optimization I'm not ready to go into since anyone can think of a way to improve
something given infinite resources. All I'm really trying to say is that there are things that
supersede taste, and while it may be subjective, it often clusters together in very tangible
ways. Hopefully by now you've mastered your ABJ, because there's monsters that require
it. The whole point of the reservoir is to fall down this tube and find this place
where we can go back into the echo realm. After some more annoying blind platforming
we can go in here and hit this switch. Which lets us save this orphan. You didn't
know how hard this one was to get because you didn't get to experience the terrible layout
of this place. The most obvious path is directly underneath where you first come into the
reservoir, but it is completely pointless unless you're in the echo realm after coming in
way from the right. Not only that, but down here contains the only save point in the entire area
which tricks you into thinking you're in the right place, but it actually makes it harder to get
where you need to go. Let me just restate this, the only save point in the entire area is actively
worse than the save point at the previous area. And if that weren't bad enough, it's immediately
guarded by these things that respawn every time you save. So now that I actually want to
leave this area, I need to backtrack to the save point in the manor, and let me tell
you getting out of this place is not easy, but eventually we do it. We also get to see these weirdos again and another dead normal person. I'm
sure there's no connection whatsoever. Even that guy shows up. It's a party Welcome to Necropolis. If you've made it this
far, congratulations, because it only gets worse. Down here is this thing. It looks important,
but it's not immediately obvious why. Then you attack this swarm of skull flies and find this
guy being all, "Go over there." so you're like, "Okay." so then you jump on this dude's
head and immediately get knocked off by an infinitely spawning swarm of flies. Then if
you're anything like me, while you're getting attacked you'll accidentally hit the switch and
realize that it made them stop spawning. Now we try again and then realize it doesn't last
long enough. At this point you might be like, "Oh O saw an alternate path so I'll go there
instead." Up here you'll find this waterfall of marrow which kills you when you touch it,
and guess where we last saved. Yep, back at the manor. This is around when you realize the
game is getting very stingy with its save points. And we're back. Turns out there's a closer
switch up here, so we'll use that instead. There's switches along the way so once you get
going it's no problem keeping the flies off. And there's the end A whole 24 hours later and I'm
feeling a little more up to it. I'm not letting that happen again. Seriously,
I'd expect that crap from Mario Maker, not this. We go through here killing
three of these freaking things, run all the way down here, and into this
area full of infinitely spawning enemies. And when I say infinitely spawning enemies,
I mean it. Without ABJ we'd never make any progress. At this point you might be wondering,
"Where's the save point? It's been 10 minutes!" Well we're in luck, it's right over here past
another floor of infinitely spawning enemies. I know I have enough health so I just start damage
boosting through them. By now these save points will have started to occupy the same space in
your brain as the loving embrace of a significant other—actually that sounds way too positive. It's
more like having one of those nightmares where you're drowning then suddenly waking up. See those
things? Well you can stand on them. At no point does the game clue you in on this, you're just
kind of expected to figure it out for yourself. And that is an example of objectively bad
game design. Here's something funny you can go down here and back dash through this
pool of marrow to get to the next area. Before the marrow speedrunning scene takes
off, I'd like to call this one ketchup skip. Here's an elevator, but it only works if one of
the switches is currently active. Now the game doesn't tell you this, so if you happen to come
across this while it's off you'll just assume it's something you unlock later. Over here there's
a big pool of marrow being fed from the sky and this is the main puzzle of the area. You need to
go around and explore to find rooms like this. Inside of them is one of these and you
can see the marrow pouring out of them. It spawns a bunch of flies and you need
to kill them all to make it vulnerable. Yeah guess what. If you're a little too eager and
keep attacking it after it's gone invulnerable it'll damage you. Always with the surprises this
game. Failing that means we need to get to the area all over again, but this just so happens to
be one of the most annoying areas in the entire game. You've got these laser beams firing off
at random heights, then these things come down to attack you as crap falls on your head. The two
previously took three hits to kill, but this one takes SEVEN, all while on tiny platforms.
I could literally spend about 10 minutes complaining about this screen alone. Now we gotta
kill the wizard by jankily reflecting his orbs while lasers come from the sky. If all goes well
we're allowed to try again. So I'm not screwing around this time. This is the best example
of how we can use jumps to attack way faster. And finally it's dead and the marrow
stops flowing from its mouth and now this previously filled area is empty, but we're
not going there yet we still got a lot to do. Back on topic, if our definition of
good varies how does one determine it? Well it's largely predetermined. without getting
into affective neuroscience theories, it shouldn't be too shocking to hear that most people aren't
applying strict epistemological methods when they're trying to see if they're having fun
or not. They just play the game and either they like it or they don't. Obviously there's
some granularity in between those two extremes, but the point still stands. Now we must ask,
why do we like video games in the first place? I believe that at the most basic level we can
attribute it physiologically to the concept of play. In a species, play is the behavior
most closely associated with intelligence. The leading theory is that play stimulates the
brain and allows it to create neural pathways in a risk-free environment that may contribute to
survival later on. As such, the brain encourages play-like behaviors by releasing the appropriate
reward chemicals accordingly. Video games can be viewed as an advanced form of play, but seeing
as we're a little more complicated than cats they can also fulfill psychological needs such
as self-actualization, the need for competition and dominance, as well as problem solving. In
essence, we've hijacked the reward pathways that were originally intended to help our survival.
Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way. Oh yeah, this place sucks. Instead
of going right, this time we go left, and then this thing spawns behind us. It
seems to be totally invincible as it slowly advances towards us. No that wasn't a
jump cut, it just teleported me here. if you happened to find that guy and ran away
without giving it a second thought, I pity you, because there's an orphan in here and
touching him is the only way to get here. And we're back in necropolis. Here's some
invisible platforms that you need to play your orb to reveal but they barely last
long enough so this is bound to happen. If you go up here you'll find that we're
actually behind that waterfall of marrow now. Unfortunately I die because
this guy's face comes off. So I'm back and a little further in we find
another one of these guys shooting energy orbs in front of a locked door, which means
there's probably another one of those mini bosses through these doors. Unfortunately
this guy isn't nearly as easy as the other one because he spawns in all these crazy
locations. You have very little time to react and you're already low on health from the journey
getting here so you're probably going to die. Now we get to do it all again. That only took five minutes. This is made
even harder by the fact that when you click to attack there's a slight delay before your
weapon becomes active. Then, if you get hit, chances are it's gonna rebound and
hit you again. I don't know why it was necessary to make him spawn in such awkward
locations. This guy is an absolute menace. This time I managed to make it up here
with 19 hit points and kill the guy but there's still the mini boss. It's just like
the other one except the arena is much harder. The problem is, if you were forced to run
away, by the time you make it back to the center its weak point will have already
disappeared and deals damage to you. Okay let's just skip to the part where it dies. But it's not over yet, I still need to save.
It took me five minutes to get here from the last save point. Instead of going back I decide
to forge ahead, assuming that there must be a save point up here. After going through some of
the worst platforming the game can throw at me I finally find one. You cannot imagine my relief.
Now the question becomes what the hell did we accomplish? Well I'll tell you, pretty much
nothing. That's right two mini bosses down and we've accomplished almost nothing. So screw
this area, I'm going across that pool we drained. And then the second boss appears. If
you try to attack him you will die, and there's that skull from way back in the manor. So how do we kill it? Well we need to protect the
crusty skull from the flies. If we do that, the crusty skull will then break the shield and reveal
a weak point. But not for long, and you need to be jumping in a very specific way to actually hit
it. And make sure you get out of the way before the shield comes back up. All things considered
this is probably the easiest boss in the game. And now we go in here. To get in we need to hit this
thing, which is apparently a harp. Welcome to the Laboratories. If you thought
it was going to be any better than Necropolis, you're wrong. It's just as confusing and just
as sprawling. There's also this wall over here. This area almost made me uninstall the game. So what makes this area so rough? Well it's
just as big and sprawling as Necropolis except it's even darker and there's even less save
points. Its even got its own mini bosses. I don't even know what that switch does. This
whole place is just confusing. I'd feel better about it if I wasn't currently killing a mini
boss in the new area while still being tied to the save point in the previous area. The puzzle that
almost got me to give up on the game was this one. You find these harps that give off a color when
you hit them. There's four of them in total and they're all numbered by the number of flies
around them. It's obvious in retrospect, but when I played, after needing to hit a harp to open
the first door, I assumed that hitting these harps would open another door and the one through four
was the order that I needed to hit them in. But that's not it, they're just the order of the notes
you're supposed to play in front of this door. But the problem is there's nothing to differentiate
this door as being opened by the orb versus one that's opened by a switch, so when hitting the
harps in order failed I assumed the switch was deeper in because there's plenty of areas i hadn't
explored yet, but the reason I hadn't explored them yet is because they're pitch black and the
enemies are literally invisible, and then I went through those areas and I died multiple times
fighting dozens of invisible enemies looking for the switch that opened the door I was already
supposed to have opened before going there. Yeah... Maybe it's my fault, but you need to
remember that this game is so obscure when I played it there were zero resources online.
If I was stuck I had to get myself unstuck, and when you're lost and confused, fighting
through the game's difficulty to search every corner of the map multiple times in hopes you
find the solution... It's a grueling experience. But honestly, this is what
games used to be like: obscure. And we didn't have resources then either.
This game made me weirdly nostalgic for the days of playing DOS titles on
my old Windows 95 home computer. You know, that enemy coming out of nowhere to
hit you from the ceiling really encapsulates the feel of this game. After running through a load
more crap we'll end up at another one of these, except this one's got infinitely
spawning enemies coming after you, and times like this will make you abundantly
aware of how easy it is to get stun locked in this game, because taking
damage cancels your attack animation. Next time around I come in from the
middle, but they're still annoying. And it's dead now we get to platform over here
down here there's those two guys we've seen before. It's more of those blinky purple lights.
The switch does this to them, and honestly, I hate them. I hate looking at them and I hate
using them, but they do this. And we've activated them all across the world. With these activated
we can go to an earlier area and find this thing, except we can't get in our weapon's not strong
enough. At least I can do this. In order to find a weapon strong enough, we need to go down
here. Inside is the decrepit gold sword. Even though I've been to this area before,
I didn't grab it because it actually will break if you use it too much. And if you save
after breaking it, it's never coming back. To repair it we need to bring it to the area
above where we fought that mini boss. At least the game gives you some hint about this because
it flashes this pillar when you first pick it up. And now our weapon does
three damage instead of two. Here's the other earring. Hopefully it'll help
us die less. With the sword earring and orphan, we're ready to move on. Surprisingly, the
next area actually has a save point before it. There isn't too much to say about this
place. You light these braziers to make the missing platforms appear and
to help keep you out of the soup. There's also these homing infinitely spawning
ghosts that phase in and out of existence. It's best to just ignore them. Also
these metroid looking things are back. If you go all the way to the right you'll find
this boat hanging over a big pool of marrow. Unsurprisingly, if you jump in you die. After
exploring a bit you'll eventually come across a big room with a chain in the middle, and when
you attack it this guy spawns. We've seen this enemy before so we know that all we need to do is
reflect his projectiles back at him. Except that doesn't work at all. You can reflect it as many
times as you want but nothing will happen. Oh, his body will flash red every time you reflect a
projectile properly, but he will never ever die. Try as many times as you want, you will not kill
him. So obviously there's got to be some solution, but what? Well you really want to know? You break
these mirrors with fireballs. You can also do it by reflecting an orb. And here's the problem with
that, previously the game taught you that the way to kill them was by reflecting their orb into
them, but now it's not. Accidentally reflecting an orb and hitting the wall is a complete fluke.
In fact, the better you are at the game the less likely you are to solve it. If there was some
visual feedback that it's invincible that would be fine, but it flashes red just like all the
other ones you killed in the exact same way. Only a little mad. Anyway, that lowered the boat, but there's one more thing to do here and that's
to hit this thing. It starts a timer and this thing shows up. He chases you everywhere,
all the way up to where you need to be. Here's the solution. You need to drop it down in
front of this thing while the timer is active. There's no indication of that and the only hint
is flashing that circle when you hit the switch. Whatever, plus one orphan. At least for all our effort we get to
enjoy a nice and relaxing boat ride. Except it's not relaxing at all.
It's actually the third boss. This thing called the Cloven. It continually
dives under the marrow while spikes spawn underneath you. It also shoots orbs at you you can
reflect the blue ones with your weapon but on top of the animation delay it's almost impossible
to react in time. You're better off ducking. If you get too close so you can hit it
with your weapon, it'll spew eggs at you. There's not really a good winning strategy.
Just attacking blindly and tanking all the damage is about as effective as actually trying.
Shockingly, there's a save point after the boss. Now we get to go over here. There's
another one of these idiots attacking us. Hitting this harp makes the fly go away.
I'm sure it'll be useful later. I don't know what's going on in this room but this dead
guy was kind enough to leave us a grit upgrade. How nice. The main purpose of this area is to
find this thing. Seems the weird skull flies are at it again. Whatever it is it disappears,
so you wander around and explore some more and then suddenly that happens. Thanks to that we
can get in here now, but it's kind of gross. Welcome to Malignance. Basically it's cancer land. If you touch one of these purple orbs the screen
does this and these things start chasing you. They're completely invincible and I
would not recommend touching them. Luckily if you leave the screen and
come back it goes back to normal. There's not many enemies in
here, it's mostly just cancer. It may look bad, but this is one
of the easier areas in the game. Up here we find some colored flies floating
around. Thanks to them we have the code to get rid of all these weird polyp things and
get the fourth and final amulet upgrade. Then you get some whispering voices, a picture
of a house, and then these four skeleton things over here. I'm sure there's some deep lore
going on here but i don't have the time. The only other point of interest is over here. There's a save point right here and a warp door
right next to it which is very convenient for backtracking, but the question remains, what the
heck is this place for? Well I'll tell you. I hope you remember every place you heard whispering
voices, because that's where we need to go. First stops here, all the way back in the Honored
Refuse. Feels like this place was an eternity ago. You might even remember this room. The wall on
the left is now slightly fuzzy and if we try we can crawl into it, leading us here into this
place. This thing is only vulnerable to magic damage and is constantly spawning enemies. It
just sits up there until it chooses one of three locations to appear at, and I'd say about ninety
percent of the time that's right on top of you. I hope you've found plenty of clarity upgrades
cause this thing takes like 20 fireballs to kill. Eventually you will kill it though, and
you're awarded with one of the seer's eyes. The next one's back here in a place
you're guaranteed to never look. At least this one's in normal vision. Last one is all the way in Necropolis. Remember
way back when I was complaining about how killing those marrow spewing mini bosses did nothing
useful? Well here it is. It lets us access this. This arena is the worst. You are not allowed
to stand anywhere where the thing won't appear on top of you. Well, we kill it and get another
eye. Yep that's right, the seer has three eyes. With all that we can go back to the hut. Yep, it's the fourth boss. Attacking the seer
directly damages you, because of course it does. Not only is the seer summoning an endless flood
of blood enemies, but ghosts are coming in from the right too. The only way to damage the seer
is to reflect its projectiles back with your orb, but good luck being able to pull your
orb out, because the constantly spawning enemies will never leave you alone. Since the
ghosts are constantly fading in and out you can never kill them when it's convenient
either,and god help you if you fall off those platforms and end up down here, because
you will immediately be stun locked to death. And when you do actually get a few
seconds to yourself to reflect an attack, you better remember the color and react
immediately. If that wasn't bad enough, sometimes it'll randomly shoot a projectile
you can't even reflect with your orb! And there is no timing or tell to when it's about
to launch an attack you can actually reflect. It can just sit there for 30 seconds doing
nothing while you just get annihilated by the endless stream of enemies. So yeah, you're gonna
die. Multiple times. I mean it. But eventually, by what mostly feels like a fluke, you will kill
the seer. And it drops about the only thing that could make it feel like any of this was worth
the effort: the fourth and final sword upgrade. With it we can break this wall and
rescue the second to last orphan. Now you might be getting the impression that I
hate this game, and yeah, I guess i kind of do, but not that much. It's complicated. If you've been keeping up with the
overarching discussion of this video, you may have realized that I'm not a very
good video essayist or whatever the kids are calling it these days. I'm not telling you
what to think, or taking any hard stances, and all I've really managed to say in too
many words is that people have different opinions and to throw up my figurative hands
because the concept of good is too complicated. The gulf between our psyches is much too vast
to work towards anything "truly" objective, but truth be told, if all you're looking for is a
good game, you can do a lot worse than listening to the vox populi. It's extremely rare that you'll
like a game that a significant amount does not, and so now that I've established that, it begs
the question... Why do I like this game? Well if you've made it this far I'm sure you can wait
a little longer for the answer. The final area is actually down here. Technically we didn't
need to do any of that stuff to beat the game. Despite being the final area, it's actually the
easiest. There's an orphan to rescue, but that's about it. Everything else is just health upgrades
and empty rooms filled with nothing but lore. That sound means that we've rescued all
the orphans. Seeing all this environmental storytelling around makes me wish that someone
else would play it so they can explain it to me, but I'm sure there's something about experiments, these things are related to the seer
we just killed, and uh in this thing, uh... I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be where
the familiar came from. Then the familiar is like a, uh, earthly incarnation of some all
devouring outer-god whose incarnation was, uh, sealed away for the good of all mankind and
buried underneath the mountain along with all the research. That's about all I've got. I could
speculate, but this video is long enough as is. Anyway at the bottom of the tower we seem to
have wandered into an alternate dimension, or at the very least somewhere off Earth. I'm
glad there's save points in alternate dimensions. Keep walking and you'll see these guys.
Clearly they wanted us to be here. And clearly they want us to go down here. They lead us to a boss called Olnok's
Eyes. It's completely stationary and the only way to damage it is to wait for these
platforms to rise and hit it in the eyes. These eyes will shoot out projectiles but you
can block them with the right color of your orb, that is, unless the platform rises underneath
you and pushes it through your shield. Then you'll get hit by one of those random streaks
of lightning, but then the boss itself will shoot a projectile so you just jump over it, but
then with no visual distinction it shoots a second kind of projectile that you can't
jump over and then you get knocked off your platform and need to wait for another cycle to
actually deal damage. And it reflects damage too. It's a lot of random unreadable attacks and
I could not imagine ever killing this boss without taking damage, but once you manage to
take out its eyes, its core becomes exposed. At this point you will have mastered
your ABJ, and that's good, because precise strafing is the only way you're
gonna be able to hit it multiple times. But you need to be patient or that'll
happen and it does four damage. After some effort we kill it, but notice
how i didn't say it was the final boss? I suppose this is the dimensional wound
where the marrow's supposed to come from. At the end of it you'll find this hole. Welcome, and no, your eyes are not deceiving
you, the final boss is actually invisible. It is so hard to avoid
getting hit by these things, you have this ball bouncing around randomly
in ways that are impossible to avoid, and these things will never stop until you
kill them, and it just keeps summoning more. Then there's this attack where you're forced to
run away and collide with another projectile. Dying is an inevitability, and when you die,
you're going all the way back. Your main goal of this fight is not to defeat him, but to defeat
him without losing too much health. Something easier said than done. You'd better hope you've
almost found all the grit and clarity upgrades, cause you're going to need them. Supposedly you
can beat this game without ever upgrading your weapon from the clumsy dagger, but I do not
buy it. This time we've got 39 hp to spare. If you actually manage to hit him you'll
get to see him for a fraction of a second, and just because he's invisible doesn't
mean he doesn't have contact damage. Oh yeah, and these projectiles scramble
your screen. How could i forget? This boss fight is honestly exhilarating,
but for all the wrong reasons. Everything's going crazy, the music's blaring at
you, stuff's flying everywhere and you can only hope that you blindly manage to hit him, and all
of this on a limited pool of health you can't even see. Genuinely I cannot imagine i cannot fathom
beating this game without the tendril sword and all of the upgrades. Even with this
much hp you'd better hope you get lucky. Your adrenaline's pumping, your heart's loud
in your ears, but eventually you will kill it. That's not the end. Oh no, the game's got one
final thing in store for you. Recognize the red stuff? Yep it's an instant kill chase sequence,
and if you die, you're doing all of that again. The precision platforming will make you clench
yourself into a black hole, then you're like, "What the hell is this thing?" but you don't have
any time to worry about it, you just need to go. You end up where it all started,
and then the marrow starts rising I had a heart attack because I thought
I did something wrong and I just died. But yep, that's the ending your amulet floats up
from the marrow and then the music starts playing. After this you get the old monster roll call. Now why do I like Marrow? The first possibility
that you might consider is that I simply enjoy pain, but you can't enjoy pain. It's a semantic
contradiction. Now i know you're all fans of the 20th century behavioral psychologist Theodor
Reik, but bear with me for the few who aren't. He posits that masochism is an attempt to elude
anxiety and to gain self-esteem by demonstrating some form of mastery over pain, so it's not
the pain itself that masochists are after. Others posit that masochism is a means of
escaping from a high level of self-awareness, and honestly video games tick both those boxes.
You challenge yourself to prove to yourself that you can overcome that challenge and you play
video games to forget how much reality sucks. So yeah, if you think I was gonna let a janky
indie title no one's ever heard of think it was better than me, you're dead wrong. But that's
just why I didn't give up. More than that, I appreciate the novelty of it all. The visual style
is the main appeal of the game and it did its job of making me want to see more of it. For all its
issues and numerous questionable design choices, as an individual work of interactive fiction, it
succeeded in its ultimate goal, and despite all the people it lost, I can only congratulate it for
that. Seeing all these non-standard design choices being made deliberately, you know that the creator
made the game exactly the way he wanted it to be, and damn the consequences. There's an artistic
purity in that. Something made because it appeals to the creator, not to an audience. Again I can
only celebrate that. Perhaps it sounds like all the reasons I like Marrow are metaphysical
ones, and while the gameplay was serviceable and reasonably engaging, I cannot deny that
I personally heavily value those things and were not for the art direction, atmosphere,
and some nebulous idea of artistic integrity, I wouldn't have played it, let alone beat it. So
do I like Marrow? It's hard to say, but i do love it in perhaps the most pragmatic, down-to-earth
sense, because I didn't like it all the time, and for all its efforts to torture me, and through
all the highs and lows, I still love it. And to this day I think of this obscure little indie game
more often than I do most AAA titles I played last year, but ultimately, that's just my opinion, and
it's probably worth only slightly more than yours. Anyway, at the end of it all the
amulet ends up at this beach here. If you made it this far, I'm
impressed. Thanks for watching.
