Marie's Room
is a 2018 free-to-play Environmental Narrative Game developed and published by Like Charlie. It was intentionally designed to be short, intended to be finished in a single session, to the point that there's no save option.
In the year 2042, a woman named Kelsey Jackson visits her high school friend Marie Torres's old bedroom to recover Marie's old journal. After she opens the journal, Kelsey starts to reminisce about their time together; the game then flashes back to 2018, where the player needs to look around the room in order to uncover details about their relationship.
Marie's Room contains examples of the following tropes:
- Adults Are Useless: None of the school authorities or the police are willing to do anything about Trevor's harassment of Marie.
- Alcoholic Parent: At one point, Kelsey mentions that her mother tended to drink a lot of gin and pass out on the couch. At another point, she mentions that her mother would sometimes be too drunk to feed her.
- Asshole Victim: Trevor — who has assaulted, robbed, and stalked multiple people over the course of the game, and is implied to have killed another — ultimately gets shot and killed by Marie.
- Boom, Headshot!: The bullet Marie fires at Trevor ends up piercing his head, killing him.
- Enter Stage Window: Trevor enters Marie's house through an open window near the end of the game.
- Kindhearted Cat Lover: Marie is portrayed as a nice girl, and she loves cats, even owning one as a pet.
- Missing Mom: Marie's mother, Loraine, is mentioned to have died prior to the events of the game, when Marie was five.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Marie feels immense guilt over killing Trevor in self-defense, going so far as to regret joining a food kitchen since it indirectly led to this incident.
- Properly Paranoid: At the game's climax, Marie keeps thinking that someone is following her and Kelsey home. That someone turns out to be Trevor.
- Skinny Dipping: It's mentioned that Kelsey liked to sneak into Mr. Jones's swimming pool naked, and once tried to convince Marie to do the same with her (she refused, opting to wear a swimsuit instead).
- The Swear Jar: One of Marie's journal entries is about how she used to swear a lot as a child, so her dad made her put a piece of candy in a jar whenever she swore.
- Throat-Slitting Gesture: In one of Marie's journal entries, she mentions that Trevor "slid his finger across his throat again" when they met each other in the school's hallway.
- Wham Line: At the climax, Trevor reveals that Kelsey was the one who helped him rob Marie and her father and assaulted the former with a baseball bat by asking her if she needs another bat to get her kicks in front of Marie.
