Stories of Mara

This is kind of an abuse of steams "free" section.. Only the first part is free but they want you to buy all following chapters? The dialog is really boring and useless. Just stick to Summer of Mara

I don't recommend stories of Mara because the visual novel is written badly and the game play does a nasty job. The dialogue is long, boring and contains ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. A lot of meaningless words and conversation make the novel unattractive. There isn't game slot for saving the game. The artwork is not appealing, either.

"This fish is useless" "So is this conversation". That summarizes Stories of Mara. Getting a technical question out of the way: [b][i]Do four buttons (LMB, Space, Enter, Numpad Enter) forward text?[/i][/b] Shockingly, yes. Many visual novels fail this test. However, there's no autoskip, and the game expects you to replay it. Within the first 9 minutes of dialogue, the first text that is in bold font is [b]"She is a strong girl"[/b], regarding Koa. This conveys to me that the writer is not confident in their storytelling skills. If the adjective applies at all, it would be patently obvious from experiencing the story, but instead, it was used as some sort of social signal. The alternative interpretation is that the town is comedically despondent, which is not better. The second and third usages of bold are less weird, but still weird; for example, the third is an entire sentence. These are meant to highlight goals for the player, that they ought to remember, but... [b]A.[/b] there isn't mechanical freedom for you to possibly lose yourself, and... [b]B.[/b] if you could lose yourself, Akaji should instead tell you, "I should be doing X". In fact, she already does that when visitin…

The "free" section of Steam is being abused for marketing and advertising. "Stories of Mara" isn't a game, it's an advertisement for the rest of the e-book and you're expected to pay real cash money to unlock the full high school anime club dropout fan-fiction... no thanks. At no point should anyone just trying to find a real, complete PC game on Steam have to deal with an advertisement for a garbage e-book instead. As an advertisement for a visual novel, this has no notable gameplay. It's just clicking through badly written, cringey fan-fiction tryhard dialogue that wouldn't be accepted in print by any real book publisher. How did such garbage end up on Steam? When failed authors can't get published in print (and possibly laughed at by publishers), they spend $100 to dump their high school fan-fiction e-book onto Steam under the guise of a game... but this time they made the conscious choice to try mislead gamers with this incorrectly published demo. To prove the author of this garbage e-book and corresponding advertisement is abusing the free section of Steam for the purpose of marketing garbage, here's the correct process that [i]the author deliberately did not follow:[/i] ht…

visual novel's are not my cup of tea but it's free

I really wish I could recommend this game because I think it has a lot of charm and, having played and really enjoyed Summer in Mara, it is nice to be back in the world and to explore the characters in more depth. My main issue with the game is just the bugs. The game utilises an autosave system with no save slots, so some bugs break the game entirely and the only way to fix it is to completely restart the game. If the bugs ever get sorted, I'd say it's definitely worth a play through, especially as the first chapter is free. But, in its current state, I personally can't recommend it