Lost Your Marbles (Playdate)
In most visual novels, when it comes time to make a decision that could change the course of the story, all you need to do is select an option from a menu to see the results. Lost Your Marbles decides to make this process much more kinetic, any question its main character needs to answer involving a quick marble game where you need to roll your way into answers and smash them to actually pick them. Suitably enough for such a silly twist, Lost Your Marbles itself is a wacky and wonderful comedy story, the player always likely to be pleased even if the marble didn’t roll into the answer they most desired.
Lost Your Marbles begins with Prota electing to roll two responsibilities into one, the young lady deciding to handle her chore of walking her dog Minty by bringing the dog with her to her new internship at the lab of Dr. Marbels. Marbels has just made a strange but useful invention that allows the human mind to winnow out every possible choice when asked a question to provide a singular perfect answer, this represented by a marble in the mind that they just need to roll into the choice in order to pick it. Unfortunately, Minty causes a ruckus in the lab, causing the device to malfunction and alter Prota’s mind while she’s testing it. Now, not only does she find herself unable to make any decision without consulting the marble-based thought process, but it is no longer precise in determining the best answer to a question, it now in the player’s hands to roll around the mindspace whenever Prota needs to make a decision. With her dog dashing off into town, she can’t afford to stay still either, running off to try and find her pet but inevitably facing many moments where she’ll need to figure out which choice to make.
Luckily for Prota, her home of Pomegranate Village is a pretty friendly and positive place where the chipper young Prota gets along with most everyone. Sure the local teens have to act cool and downplay it, but Prota finds many people willing to help her brainstorm ways to track down and find Minty, few of them really aware there’s anything up with her as she starts giving off the wall answers if you roll the marble a certain way. Considering this town has a cactus with an architecture degree and an alligator man running a ball museum though, Prota being a little off kilter doesn’t seem to rub anyone the wrong way as most every interaction seems to exist to provide room for some more comedic writing. While certainly goofy and often deliberately corny, this works in Lost Your Marbles’s favor as it hardly feels predictable and I found myself laughing out loud a few times at the unexpected directions the game would take with certain set-ups. Since no one’s taking the time to point out absurdity, they can instead explore the weird choices as if they were legitimate considerations, the choice system already interesting before you begin to factor in the way it actually plays.
Your path through Pomegranate Village will change based on the decisions you make at each location, most segments of the game relying on the rule of three when it comes to the player needing to make key choices in how they’ll cook up some new way to track down Minty. Some situations like crafting a sandwich to lure Minty or designing a robot to compute the possible location of the dog will ask you which components to use and even give you a visual of your creation to top things off, but even when the choices don’t pay off with a silly image, the interactions can still be amusing thanks to writer Kim Belair’s sense of humor. Some creativity does come through in the marble rolling too as each location’s three decisions all take place in different mindspaces that aim to match that area with the objects you’ll be rolling over and around. The library has large stacks of books that you’ll be rolling across or behind, the ball museum has a space based on billiards, and when things aren’t based on the location itself, they will instead tie to what you’re working on like a tarot reading where the play field matches the card you’re trying to interpret. Not every layout feels like a solid fit, pinball can be a little too chaotic to roll the ball as you like and a pipe-based one at the junkyard requires you to slowly get back to where you want to be if you miss your mark, but overall they do make decisions more visually interesting than just sending a marble where you want it to go.
This does mean that sometimes there is some skill in picking which of the three choices you want to smash open with the marble. Thankfully, choices take three solid hits to crack so you’re not doomed if you touch one by mistake, although what a choice even is won’t be properly displayed until you’ve bumped it once. Using the Playdate’s crank angled downward, you tip it forward and back to tilt the game world right and left, building up momentum sometimes key to hitting certain decisions that are high up or in hard to reach places. Usually the difficulty isn’t too high, once you get a good handle on how the crank relates to marble movement you probably won’t ever make a decision you didn’t mean to, but needing to nail things properly still requires some ability and hitting the ones that are in difficult spots is more satisfying because it’s not a straightforward selection. One of the more effective parts of the choice system though is that for the most part, Lost Your Marbles can make any outcome funny, even the ones that seem pretty plain in concept. When you’re making a missing dog poster for example, choosing a perfect picture of the dog may seem less funny conceptually than an extreme close-up or a shot of Minty’s butt, but if you do pick it, the characters begin to worry that using too good a picture might make people want to keep the dog instead, the friends briefly spiraling into an imagined scenario of accidentally advertising the best dog around to the whole town. Sadly, there are a few occasions where a choice barely gets a reaction, but there’s certainly enough to laugh at even if it seems the well of creativity ran dry at parts.
Lost Your Marbles’s plot does follow a few set beats and has a few required locations, but there are alternate endings and new locations you can reach if you’re more selective about your choices. Rather than trying to figure out which decisions lead to which areas though, Lost Your Marbles has used symbols to mark ideas that lead down certain narrative paths. The wackiest and weirdest ideas are often marked with a Moon symbol, and going for all moons will take you down a different route than going for the more positive Sun choices or the more difficult to hit Star options. Mixing and matching when you go for certain symbols during a story can split the path a bit more as well, and while things do normally come to a pretty similar end, there is at least enough to see to make a few playthroughs worth trying to see what other jokes lie down different roads. Lost Your Marbles is very short on the whole which works in its favor for quick replayability and makes it easier to skip past the parts that appear in every run, and after the credits there is even a checklist to help you figure out how you can shake things up in the next go around.
THE VERDICT: Lost Your Marbles finds a nice middle ground for its decision making through marble play where it’s not too difficult to get the outcome you want but still involved enough that you do feel like you did the work picking it. Having nearly every potential narrative branch be comedic thanks to the generally positive and accommodating people of Pomegranate Town also makes the game’s different routes worth pursuing before you even consider that there are unique levels to find by utilizing the symbol system to guide your choices. Some marble play areas are a touch tedious, but Lost Your Marbles is primarily a delightful little visual novel that succeeds in dishing out silliness and smiles as a reward for how you choose to use the marble.
And so, I give Lost Your Marbles for Playdate…
A GOOD rating. The kooky characters and wonderfully unusual world of Lost Your Marbles would have likely made it an entertaining visual novel even if you made straightforward choices, the quality of the writing’s humor making the hardest part of making a decision being settling on which amusing set-up you want to see unfold. With the game’s short length and ease of replayability though, it’s not a choice you need to commit to too strongly as you can go back in and see the other outcomes, but there are still enough different paths to take that you would be at it quite a while if you wanted to see it all. Some greater divergences near the end could have spiced up the usually similar finale and certain marble play fields aren’t as exciting to revisit, but needing to angle things right to build up momentum and smash through certain selections is a satisfying way to make you earn your desired outcomes. The different play field designs even make heading to a new area interesting in how you’ll play the marble stages rather than the player only looking forward to what they’ll be reading, the marble play not just a quirky way of controlling your choices thanks to the love the level designs receive. It is still kept simple to avoid adding any aggravation to an otherwise breezy and friendly atmosphere, Lost Your Marbles a delightful and quick story even if some stronger skipping options would have made it even easier to dive back in to see an alternate route.
Lost Your Marbles perhaps even rises above fellow Playdate Season 1 game Casual Birder in terms of dishing out comedy while finding some use for the Playdate crank, but they do feel like they have different comedic sensibilities and gameplay goals so thankfully it doesn’t feel like Playdate dished out two similar experiences so close together in their first season of gratis games. Lost Your Marbles does easily bring a smile to your face and make you eager to see what silliness crops up next, the crank fitting into the experience so well it feels a bit natural rather than some system-specific gimmickry. With a little pruning of some of the less solid marble levels, Lost Your Marbles could have really kept the player’s spirits high, but its wonderfully weird world still tries to make sure some cheery humor is going to come your way no matter how you play.