Through the ages, we have seen many a wondrous sculpture made possible by artists with the sheer dedication, passion and brilliance to create them, using little more than a hammer or mallet of some kind and a cutting tool, be it a knife, chisel, etc. I mean, I can't even make a clay bowl without it looking like a cracked, fossilized dinosaur turd, so even trying to fathom the talent (and patience!) it must take to make works such as the ones created by, oh, cliche pick but what the hell, Michelangelo is almost equivalent to staring at Nyarlathotep in the, uh, face? Well, at it general (if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a Lovecraft deity, and looking at it in its true form will result in Scanners head-'splosion levels of insanity). Here I use "hammer and chisel" as representative of craftsmanship - basic tools used for greater aesthetic if not transcendent good by the artist holding them. It is appropriate then, that not only does this game, Dreaming Mary, also feature a room with sculpture-related puzzles, but that it is a real wonder to look at, a true work of visual craftsmanship. It's certainly not the first RPG Maker-made game to look this good, but it's also not that often we get one either. You really do get a sense of this candy-coated dreamworld Mary has made for herself and her animal friends. Everything is detailed and drawn well, and there are no generic or preset assets that I could see in this game. The hammer and chisel indeed... it could be said in fact this game's current acclaim and hype is both because of its aesthetics but also another thing the hammer and chisel represents, and not necessarily in the best way.

OK, so everyone going into this game is probably aware it's a horror title. If not, then I hope you're damn well prepared for it! The creeping suspicions that things aren't right begins when you enter Boaris' area, where the music becomes more sinister and talks to you in a rather... creepy manner shall we say. Then we start getting into talks about seeds and that's when the story takes a turn for the worse. All I can say is... do, for your own sake try to win the bunny's and fox's challenges they present to you to get the seed (you will receive the seeds no matter what but as a penalty for losing you not only lose a flower petal, Ib-style, but also... well, have you seen the movie Inland Empire? Or at least the one picture it is most famous for? It's like that, in cartoon bunny and fox form - just, no thank you). After you get the seed the music suddenly stops and the character disappears...

So what about the hammer and chisel deal I was going about before? Well here it is: now you have all the seeds to enter Boaris' humble abode, and if you were clueless to his signals before there's no beating around the bush this time when, before offering you the final seed to unlock his door he says, straight-up, right to your face with that ugly grin on his face: Euugghh. OK so supposedly there are people who think this game could mean many things, and there are isolated bits where that may be true but the main thrust of what Boaris is supposed to be - if you somehow think that he is meant to be anything but a then you are either terribly naive or need help with your reading comprehension. That may sound harsh, but really, it's so blatant how can you NOT see it? And if you get the ending where you even get to hear his creepy high-pitched voice with that disturbing pseudo-lullaby and STILL don't get it, then I feel there is no hope for you. Maybe it's better that way, as this is ugly stuff going on here.

I'm bothering about this because one, that there supposedly exist people who played the game and didn't catch on to this aspect at all. I dunno, I have a hard time believing this. It is so blatant you'd have to be just completely spaced-out to miss it! The fact the character is represented as, well, a boar is probably the most subtle aspect of his character. But, well, I guess it can't be too surprising, considering how often people fail to recognize the main message that many a polemic or artistic work tries to spell out, in big letters, screamed through a megaphone, and causing tremors and possible tectonic shifts in the ground. And it's not a recent phenomenon either - there was a man who once made, in clear satirical jest, a most modest proposal to cannibalize the young. People missed the "satire" and "jest" part of it. Speaking of cannibalism, another man entrenched himself deep within a Jungle... an industrial jungle you could call it. He saw what a terrible place it was, unfit for any person to be earning such a pittance for their labor here, so he wrote a book, trying his damnedest to point out how poorly the working class were being treated that he even went out of his way to make up a story about one man who was so overworked he fell over right into the meat grinder to shock people to their senses. Unfortunately people were less concerned with the treatment of their "fellow" workers than they were about the possibility of eating manburgers. So it instead became a book about proper food health and safety inspection rather than the class struggle it was actually about. And yet another man, in more recent times, made a movie called Funny Games... twice. Some people thought they were actually good for some reason. Anyway you get my point.

And that's my problem with what the game communicates: it, here it comes, what you've ALL been waiting for, hits its point home, right into your forehead, like with the very same hammer and chisel used to sculpt its landscapes (A HA! Now I can move on). It's not just Boaris I'm talking about either. There's also the radio you can occasionally listen to in your room. There's one point you can listen to the radio where a "Q & A" is going on that provides small bits of background on the game's character and her life. Some of it is interesting and helps to make sense and give context to the dream world without giving away too much, but other points, not so much, like why yes, indeed, dear viewer, everything you see IS in fact symbolic of this girl's life, if you failed to pick up on EVERYTHING ELSE that you saw and heard before this! Like, you know, how we mentioned a few seconds ago that in her real life she has a maid, and in the first room over she has what appears to be, hm, what is that, could it be? Why, it's an honest-to-goodness maid! A BUNNY maid in fact! Well how about them apples? Ahhhh, the beauty of the craft of the scenery, offset by the pain of my brain being carved in, my skull like cave rock! I KNOW, CREATOR, I GET IT, AGGGGHHH! MAKE THE PAIN STOP!

Perhaps I'm being too hard on the game, as it does offer moments here and there to ponder over, details you do have to pay attention to to get the full picture of the girl's troubled life. Some things remain ambiguous and open to interpretation to the end (for me at least - I'm still unsure what that painting's about). And there are also questions that remain up in the air - the bit of story you hear about her mother and her "dream powers." It seems as though that there's more to what's going on here than just a lucid dream gone bad - OR IS IT? Yeah if you get the best ending it just throws a aspect at you I don't particularly care for, my least favorite kind of "ambiguous ending" simply because it feels less like a conclusion, or a drift into ambiguity and more like a cheap cliffhanger to some old action/spy TV show. On the whole, there are aspects to the game's imagery and themes that are intriguing, but the major facets are just too lacking in subtlety for a game that's meant to be abstract and up to individual interpretation.

Even with the game being spotty in that aspect, the atmosphere does hold very well, even if that too is handled in an obvious way and could have used maybe a few more transitions here and there (it is entirely possible to go from your pretty pink world of pretty pinkness straight to in a matter of minutes if you know exactly what to do, but unless you're playing with a guide that's not likely to happen on your first run). The middle part of the game, the part where you're collecting "seeds" and where these two dichotomous aspects of the game meet most in the middle, is probably where it is most interesting, because it succeeds at being suggestive of something terrible beyond the bright colors more than any other part of the game. Except, perhaps, for one particular area where you are introduced to the ability to run with "Shift," followed by an ominous message to "always run." It's at this point when you REALLY become wary of the game, and if you succeed completely at reaching the deepest, darkest realm of the game, the part that isn't Boaris, is when the game goes in no-holds-barred, pulling no punches back and throws itself RIGHT on top of you. It gets nasty. You'll know it immediately when it happens, when to heed those instructions to hold that damn "Shift" key, that is. And failure to do so will result in probably one of the scariest "game over" screens/sequences you'll see in one of these games yet. So while the jumps between scenery feels a bit abrupt, at least when you DO enter the scenery you've been awaiting for, it at least manages to deliver quite the wallop.

I've still barely covered all my other thoughts on this game - alright, how about, well, the game itself? It's another one of the RPG Maker adventure titles where mechanics and gameplay matter less than it's atmosphere, story and scenery. It's all side-scrolling, of course, there are only a few rooms to enter, and the first few minutes of the game consists of playing childishly simple minigames (intentionally made to be so clearly). So I briefly mentioned a couple characters. Well, the ones you meet in total are the bunny maid with a fixation on Greek mythology, a bookworm er, bookpenguin I should say (and the most sympathetic character you'll come across the entire game), some fox hussy hanging out in a bar (this is the one character whose representation mystifies me - from what I and others who've looked at the game can conclude, it can't be anything other than Mary's tutor - an unusual depiction of a tutor if I've seen one) who likes playing games of hide and seek, the sinister Boaris of course, and... a fifth, mysterious character. I won't give out too much away, but you two meet in an area that has maybe my favorite bit of music in the whole game. And these are all represented by animations that are basic and simple, uncluttered designs but they are defined, colorful, expressive, and well-drawn, which is what ultimately counts. In each room they reside a variation of the tune that plays through the game's hallway (consider it the "main theme") will play, like in the owl's room a minor classical twist to the song will play while in the bar it's jazzier, a very nice touch and a catchy tune at that. So after meeting each character and playing increasingly "difficult" (they're not, except, well, there are a few that I had to look up, more on that in a minute) mini-games it's at the end where, depending on what hidden rooms you've found, how well you've done on the seed-based questions, and so on is where it's determined which ending you'll get, there being four in total. Now like I said the main "challenges" are simplistic, but there are a couple of ones that threw me off - there's one talk of a brown journal, and another involving a key. The solution to one of these is something I don't think I ever would have gotten without looking at a guide, as it requires you knowing to stand in a specific spot and interacting with it standing in a specific direction, and is nothing I would ever would think to do without being told I could even do it (classic adventure game tropes, ohh you!). Besides that one bit, the game shouldn't give you too much trouble to get through, and every playthrough is necessarily short enough so that you can painlessly (if you can put up with playing the same inane minigames repeatedly - and again, I understand this is a game presenting an initially ideal dream world as seen from a child's perspective, and so this is intentional for narrative purposes, just saying) play through the game on the same save file four times in a row (assuming you correctly execute the steps to get each ending each time) which unlocks a password for bonus material and also a password for an item in-game.

Alright, I think I can come to a final assessment now, at last. Man, for setting up what I thought would make for a great double metaphor it sort of... dropped off in the middle there. So I'll revive it again! It's both a great work of craftsmanship and also a bludgeon to the forehead as to the horrors that it wants to depict (the hammer hitting even harder when contrasted with the "deceptively" cute, dreamy fairyland aesthetics of the starting areas), with a solid mix of admirable and merely functional elements sprinkled about in between. I won't go as far as to say that it's but at the same time I cannot say it's quite as consistently amazing as others seem to feel it to be. It's a good title. Yeah, this game does deal with some dark subject matter that certain people sensitive to that kind of material should be very wary of, and the front page for this game I think spells that warning out clearly enough, but for anyone else, yeah, give it a try if for no other reason to witness artisan tools put to great use, which when it does it well, it can be fantastic to see, and when it doesn't, well, grab the closest knife or pair of scissors to fend for yourself immediately, since you're about to face the oncoming attack of UNSUBTLETY! Anyway, check it out and make up your mind about it!