Maruja Mallo

⠀

‎

"Maruja Mallo" is refreshingly advertised as a visual novel, but instead it's a game (technically, anyway). Usually it's the other way around and amateur authors try to push e-books onto Steam as games (and those e-books are always about the authors adventures with his imaginary anime girlfriends). This game is also refreshingly not about the authors imaginary girlfriend (I think). Instead it's an interactive point and click adventure game about Maruja Mallo. Yeah, me too. So I looked it up, and she was an avant-garde/surrealist artist famous in the 1920s. Okay. What do you do in the game? You read a lot of badly written e-book text but then you get some point and click puzzles where you get to interact with Maruja Mallo's most popular artworks. Or so I'm told, I guess we can take that as given. It's difficult to call this a game, because of all the endless, badly written e-book/visual novel fanfiction text, which takes prime position in front of gameplay or anything PC gamers look for in a PC game. The "author" fails to grasp the important game design axiom, "Show, don't tell". You just get stuck reading walls of mediocre text, where they should have related the story…

Umm... I wasn't trying to learn anything today!

[h1]Before I played Maruja Mallo, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good[/h1]

Very quick "game" - honestly just a story to learn more about this interesting artist. Would only recommend to those who like art history, learning new things, or trivia. I was HIGHLY disappointed** in Scene/Part 7. It said you could Scale the items, yet there were no instructions on how to do so, and I swear I tried everything. If anyone figures that out, please let me know. Haha! I did mark this as a recommendation, but honestly I don't think most of my friends that game would enjoy this. **update: see comments below from Dev.