Videogame Reviews: Stories of Mara

Stories of Mara does currently consist of the 1st chapter’s 1h long prologue that entices you to await eagerly the continuation of the story!

Game’s details:

Genre: Casual, Fantasy
Classification: Visual Novel
Supported System: Windows 7
Developer: Chibig
Platform: Steam, Itch.io
Price: Free to Play
Gameplay: ~1h

Game’s premise:

You play as Akaji, a strong young woman inhabitating the island of Mara.

While performing your daily routine at the workshop, you become aware of an unhandy situation involving the sudden arrival of a boat grasping too much attention of the local beach bar’s customers.

It happens to be the crashed boat of Koa, your friend who is nowhere to be seen.

In search of a friend:

Worriedly, you begin questioning fellow inhabitants about Koa’s whereabouts. However, no one results to be taking the issue at heart, while casually brushing the topic away stating that nothing may have happened to the lively Koa.

To add more burden onto your shoulders, everyone seems to be in need of more work or repairments to ask of you causing you to be stuck at the workshop once again. You manage to find a compromise while offering exchanges coming to the work requests, in order to achieve useful information coming to what may have happened to your friend.

The workshop laborer:

Akaji is a very caring and hardworking character, which causes her to accept way too many work from her neighborhood’s side. She seems to be unable to say “no”, which clearly destabilizes her emotionally, which can be noticed by her constant change of facial expressions, as well as the dialogue choices the game does offer which tends to be among the motivated hard worker type of mindset and a genuinely worn-out emotional state.

Personal considerations:

This game got me absolutely excited while viewing the amount of variety of traits coming to so many different non-human fantasy characters. Each character does display a really detailed and originally fabricated designs, as well as overall concepts.

Noticeable differentiated ways of speech are also a huge bonus.

Featurings:

This is the 1st chapter of the game (which will bring us a total of 5 chapters) that recounts the prologue of the story. The length is of 1h and while the story pacing is very casual and laid-back, it does offer interesting narration and features, such as quality art, partial voice acting, sound effect noises and a neat assortment of background music.

Being a Visual Novel, the game will display choices which may or may not influence the outcome (that cannot be said, as the full game is yet to be released).

To proceed with the story you’ll have to visit a variety of places displayed on the island’s map, an appreciated feature creating more immersion in the world Stories of Mara portrays.