Marmoset is an action platformer where you take the role of a girl called Luna. Your mission is to descend from the relatively safe tree village into the caves below to battle monsters. You'll run and jump your way through a number of puzzle-like levels collecting resources, which you will then take to a workshop to make things you'll need to aid you, such as keys and potions.
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| Our protag, Luna. |
As far as Luna's fighting skills, you can defeat enemies by jumping on their heads like Mario in a miniskirt...and that's it. And don't miss, because you don't get invincibility frames. So even the cutest, little enemies can whup your ass faster than you can say, "I just got my ass whupped." And while there's no lives counter, you have three chances to die before you are kicked back to the tree village. Fortunately, Luna has a great tool to aid her in this and getting around in general; her ever-present rocket boots.
As you might have guessed, her rockets boots allow her to slow her decent when she jumps. This is useful for when you're falling down blindly or giving yourself that little extra bit of distance when crossing poison lakes. You can go faster by holding the L and R buttons while airborne. As mentioned before, you can use the boots to attack enemies with more precision. Using boots drains energy and while that energy is plentiful and restores when you're not using the boots, it CAN run out. It drains even faster when holding L and R, so be careful when floating about.
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| Luna's Rocket Boots help her fight enemies and float over hazards. |
You'll also notice I mentioned that the village is relatively safe. This is because weird, but weak enemies appear in town at night, and you can grind apples to sell for money. They only show up outside, so you don't have to worry about entering a building and being ambushed.
There are a surprising number of things you can do while in town. You will need to build machines so you can build items you'll need to advance the story. You can fish, grow stuff, and go to the arcade to play a Flappy Bird knockoff. You can unlock more stuff, but it can get pretty grindy to do so.
Fishing is just about the hardest thing you'll do in the game. Your goal is to keep the colored fish somewhere within the outline of the clear fish until the bar fills up and you catch the fish. The thing about it is that if you make a mistake and the colored fish gets all the way to the bottom, you'll have little to no chance to catch the fish. There's a glitch where Luna will throw her fishing line on the land instead of into the water. It's weird and embarrassing. There's another glitch where you'll catch the fish, only to be told you didn't catch it. WTF?
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| What are you doing? The fish are the other way. |
On to the little things. The graphics are blah. They aren't atrocious, but a little too pixelated for my liking. I like what they were going for with Luna's design, but it's not very well done because of the style they went with. There were a few things where I had trouble judging what they were until it was too late. And when you're jumping on enemies, the camera will give you whiplash.
The music is mostly forgettable. It's just some relaxing beats that sound like something you'd listen to sitting near the lake with your girlfriend. The boss theme is pretty good, though. It sounds like what radioactive hipsters would listen to while fighting monsters in the future.
If the game has one big flaw, it's the constant freezing, particularly when you're in the menus. It's bad, to the point that you have to reset the game. The game froze so often, I half expected Elsa to show up and start singing Let It Go. It was especially problematic in a cabin you MUST go to in order to progress.
Also, it's clear that English is not the creator's first language. I mean, it's Mistake City. There are some big-time translation errors. On a good note, you may learn a few words of Portuguese.
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| Clearly, English isn't the creators first language. |
Maromoset had a chance to be average, old-school platforming fun, but just wound up being a glitchy mess. The game is far too grindy for its own good. The fishing minigame isn't fun. It's a decent platformer but could have used more polish. You aren't missing anything if you choose to pass on it. However, if you can overcome grind and glitches, Give It A Try.
