Free exploration game Marie's Room is like a bite of Edith Finch

Marie's Room released on Steam last Friday and has garnered nearly 600 collectively 'overwhelmingly positive' reviews since. It's a free, first-person narrative game where you play as a woman named Kelsey and—you may have guessed—explore Marie's room.

The goal is to find Marie's old high school journal, and also to fill in its entries by interacting with various odds and ends around the room, from clothes to pictures to posters. Not all items have journal entries tied to them, but they all yield some sort of memory, not to mention some top-shelf voice acting from Lauren Hendler. As a game about memories, it may remind you a little of the stellar What Remains of Edith Finch, but Marie's Room tells a very different story.

"Join Kelsey in her trip down memory lane and uncover Marie and Kelsey’s past by exploring Marie’s room as it was all those years ago, or at least, how Kelsey remembers it," its Steam page reads. "Explore their stories, linked to every object in the room. Open drawers and search Marie’s laptop for clues. Find out what secrets the room holds."

You can finish Marie's Room in under an hour, which I did. I went into it planning to play like 10 minutes so I could offer some impressions, but I ended up playing the whole thing. So there's my spoiler-free endorsement: Marie's Room is free and worth your time.

Austin freelanced for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and has been a full-time writer at PC Gamer's sister publication GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a staff writer is just a cover-up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news, the occasional feature, and as much Genshin Impact as he can get away with.