After cutesy and lighthearted games such as Blue Port and Aqua Cube, Fox Eye presented Holdover as their first Darker and Edgier game, and it shows.
- Marie is stuck in an abandoned laboratory. Alone. With very little to protect herself. Oh... and there's the matter of water. Water she can't swim in. No way to breathe, just her own lungs and a will to survive. If she manages to take damage, she'll be naked, cold, and, oh yeah, alone. Did we mention that there's also things out there trying to kill her?
- If Marie's Oxygen Meter gets too low, she'll start drowning. As in... realistically drowning. She'll cover her mouth and nose struggling to hold her breath, and she'll also move at a slower pace as she loses consciousness. If the meter reaches zero, well... just look at the page image. Consider it mercy that the game doesn't provide Marie with a voice actress; she would've made her realistically-graphic drowning feel and sound even worse (something that was already shown with Yuu & Aya, but also shown more fearfully later on with the likes of Miyo, Margaret, Natica, and the Blue Port J trio).
- You can also occasionally find spots that leave Marie trapped underwater where she can't get out (such as what's shown in the page image. That is, until you first find the arm upgrade very close to that area that allows her to climb out of there). In that case, the player is Forced to Watch as Marie suffocates and drowns. Hope you saved.
- The other dangers in the game don't treat Marie any better than drowning does, either. Whenever she dies from the security lasers and spikes that are scattered throughout the game, she splats out blood. The game keeps track of this, and leaves every blood splat you made in every spot she died from these hazards for the rest of the game, even after reloading a save or starting the game all over again. This means that you get to see and remember all of those spots you let the poor girl die in this way, even after not playing the game for a long time. Besides toggling off any cases of blood at the game's title screen, the only way to completely erase all of the blood splats you made is to completely remove the game from your computer.
- Save Scumming is very much a necessity to get through the game due to its high difficulty, and the game is very lenient on letting you quicksave states wherever and whenever you want. However, it is perhaps too lenient, as carelessly quicksaving a state at the wrong time (such as while falling into Spikes of Doom or when the Oxygen Meter is almost depleted) can and will lead to an inescapable Cycle of Hurting and torturing each time the save state is reloaded, making you see Marie get impaled, shot, or drowned over and over again, with no way out of it but to hard load an earlier save file, or starting the game over again. In the case of her non-drowning deaths, this means overlapping a lot more blood splats together in the same spots. Fox, himself, has warned players of the dangers of careless quicksaving.
- The main reason why Marie was in the laboratory to begin with? She was in a big accident that threatened her life and put her in a coma. At the very young age of five. Her father, Tanner, had to install computer anklets on her to repair her organs, and then seal her in a capsule for ten years to protect her while the laboratory was under attack from a nuclear world war. We never find out about the accident that damaged Marie so severely, but it may be hard to think about the implications if it had to take a whole decade to bring her body back to a stable, albeit numb, condition.
- As a part of the page image shows, there are piles of bones scattered throughout the game that you'll have Marie step over on your way through the facility. There are a lot of bones, both on land and underwater. It seems like Marie wasn't the only person that tried to escape from the facility, but by the time she wakes up, she's the only one left to still be alive. Take care not to let Marie die, lest she becomes another example of all of the bones she passes by. What doesn't help is how she figures this out for herself after the terminal in Network Room C fails on her at first, and she nearly goes into a Despair Event Horizon over it.Marie: There are a lot of bleached white bones... Others came here...? They died trying to escape... Dad... I've failed...
