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Marron's Day

The Summer of Demos - Day Twenty-Five

Marron's Day

npckc is a Japanese/English translator, doujin game zine curator, digital artist and GB Studio solo developer of many short narrative games that are mostly pay-what-you-want on Itch. Their short, pointed stories, cute art and earnest writing exemplifies a lot of what I look for on Itch, so I’m delighted to be able to cover a demo of theirs today.

You can enable this cute border in the settings.

In Marron’s Day, you play as a rabbit named Marron who loves helping her friends and stealing carrots. In the demo, you start a quest to find all of the flowers your friend Mugi lost from his bouquet before the dance. There is also a flower garden minigame available to play separately, one of many minigames promised in the full game.

Developed in GB Studio, the controls are as simple as walking around and pushing “A” on your GameBoy (GB Studio games will run in any Game Boy Emulator or on real hardware) to talk to fellow animals, plant flowers or push boxes. The colour palette changes often between areas and the 8-bit sprites are cute and generally easy to parse, so I would suggest at least a Game Boy Color if you play on hardware, but a backlight may not be essential.

As sweet as the game is, I will say that the main theme by sdhizumi to get grating in the brief span of the demo, especially when trying to solve the block pushing puzzle. At the end of the demo, you need to push crates in an attic to make a path to Mugi’s lost flower. I found the pushing itself unsatisfying, with no sound or pushing sprite accompanying the push for a little tactility. I also felt that the goal was too visually subtle and needed to re-enter the attic multiple times to reset the puzzle so I could find my way. As simple as it was, I would have appreciated some text telling me about resetting the room or a more obvious goal.

Despite these complaints, I am eager to see more of Marron’s Day and implore you to check out the rest of KC’s games on Itch.

In a word : bnuy.

Marron’s Day is an upcoming silly adventure game developed and published by npckc for PC via Itch and Steam and GameBoy. An expanded demo is planned for Autumn. The Steam install simply opens the game in the SameBoy emulator and will not track playtime. All images used copyright of npckc unless otherwise stated.

This article is part of the Summer of Demos series, where I’ll be releasing a Demo Diving preview article each day in July. If you liked this article, be sure to share it with a friend or enemy. If you back me on Patreon, you get access to articles one day before they release anywhere else. If we reach £25/month before the end of July, I’ll extend the Summer of Demos into August.

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