M/1

M/1 is a short game about poverty and its exploitation, 15 minutes long if you are shooting for different endings.
Our protagonist Zoe is happy to have finally gotten a job and goes on to do it - just to wake up somewhere completely else.

The game has a few horror elements in it, but is really more an emotional exploration trip into the life of a young woman.
The few death instances feel like they rather distract from the experience, whereas one (the shadow) adds to the story. Even if the chase scene itself is poorly done.


Not sure whether typo or not.

The Story starts out very cute and cuddly. With our protagonist being happy. All is well, bare the foreshadowing of it changing in the opening.

So what do you do?
You get cookies (please do not eat them), you go out to your cleaning job and a certain line gives you a certain suspicion



Which is soon replaced by something else and thus plays with your expectation well.

You then can explore a vastly different area, a mine - trying to escape the desolate space, and trying to find out what it even is. Things do not add up just yet, so on to find out!

The mapping and general graphics are actually very decent despite this being the creator's first game.
There are some odd repetitions in the mine, but it all comes together fairly well. There is still a lot of room for polish. Like making the mine a little bit smaller and look more useable - which in this case does have a purpose, though. The tracks are not forming a line and are just left in pieces sometimes.
The portraits are beautiful (Zoe's, anyway) and you will have a short comic strip to progress the story as well.

The music is often times non-existant. The pieces that are there are very well chosen and portray a melancholic feeling. Many times the sound-effects, like the heartbeat, in its stead make it up well, but other times you are left completely devoid of any music when there is a lot going on. Particularily the ending struck me as silent.


That is your experience shining through.

What is good about this game is that while it starts out fairly slow, it gets better and better as you play and find out more about your character.
She speaks indirectly about herself in the way she comments items and places you find. It makes for a sad story.

I just wonder whether the "all happy" start you had adds up with what you are shown later on. Or is she is just thrown back into her earlier fears and problems?
And whether or not the starting scenes just ignored her underlying troubles.
There could be so much more to learn about her daily life which led up to this point!

You cannot connect the mine-passage to much you have seen before, which makes her reaction to herself not as reasonable as it could be. The fact that you see something makes it much more interesting, just as a few out-of-the-norm things in your apartment would have been.


In the different endings you find different ways of dealing with the trauma, which are fairly reasonable. The trauma has two parts adding up. One is your general identity and life, the other is what happened just before. With the latter being used for the shock value and for a breaking point, but without as indepth value as the rest (imho). I believe this game could even have went without it.



The writing is a little bit of a mixed bag. Some passages are sensibly written, while others are just listening to our protagonist being scared and repeating "nonono" all over. It comes down to straightforward and pretty solid writing, it just is littered with lots and lots and lots of typos in all their forms.

And then there are a couple of missing files resulting in crashes of the games.
Using items will result into a crash as well.
Since this is still tagged as "beta", these should be fixed soon.

It gives you a lot to think about. And while I find the general exploitation idea of the rich a little bit silly, it is part of a sad reality.
I would personally enjoy some more positive lights, since people are stronger than one imagines, the spotlight on recovery and moving one. But it works very well for what it is.

It is a nice first game with an emotional take on an issue. There is a lot of polishing to be done, but one can look forward to future projects.