Video Game / Holdover

Take your pick. Is that Roll or Samus?

A young girl named Marie wakes up in a dank, dark laboratory wearing nothing but a white, one-piece swimsuit, and two metal anklets around her bare feet, designed to keep her healthy. A holographic message from her father says that she should have just woken up from a special capsule designed to cure an illness of hers, and that she should now try to leave the facility she resides in.

Easier said than done, of course, since the facility has long since been abandoned, is nearly completely flooded (and despite being suited for it, those anklets make it impossible to swim), and is full of various security robots out to vaporize her (and her swimsuit) with powerful lasers. She quickly finds an advanced armor swimsuit that can shield her from the lasers, at the cost of vaporizing the half that was hit.

Thus goes Holdover, a 2009 freeware Metroidvania Platform Game from the underwater Doujin Soft circle known as Fox Eye. It features plenty of girl-running-around-completely-naked action, and wields the developer's strong emphasis on maintaining an Oxygen Meter.

Find its website here. It can be downloaded from either there or from the game page of Fox Eye's central website.

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Holdover contains examples of:

• 100% Completion: Getting all the blue hearts yields a bonus picture. It's the game's concept art, showing off the nature of Marie's adventure as well as some of her expressions (including a very adorable smile), and a clear drawing of her Disappeared Dad, Tanner.
• Adjustable Censorship: The game allows you to toggle whether or not Marie bleeds out when she dies from lasers or spikes. If this is toggled on, you can also clean the entire game of all blood splats by removing it from your computer.
• All There in the Manual: According to a Japanese-only preview image◊, Marie's full name is Marie Annette (which sounds like the word "marionette"). However, her last name is never brought up in the game proper.
• Antepiece: You get a dark-blue suit for Marie not too long after starting the game. To show that this swimsuit is the armor the game claims it to be, you are then required to run through a ceiling laser before you can advance, showing how the swimsuit takes damage for Marie instead of killing her outright as was the case with the white swimsuit she originally had on. This shows that you can brute force your way through some hazards to progress, though you must also maintain the "armor" by repairing it at certain capsules whenever it's been damaged.
• Armor Points: The dark-blue swimsuit you find early in the game counts as an "armor" for Marie. It has a 2-pixel high light-blue meter that represents the upper and lower half of her swimsuit. When one half of the meter is quickly depleted from damage, its corresponding half of the "armor" gets torn off, making Marie vulnerable to die from taking further damage from the exposed half of her body until she gets her swimsuit repaired with a healing capsule.
• Author Appeal: One of the first Fox Eye games to incorporate Clothing Damage and skintight or skimpy swimsuits for cute girls, but underwater exploration and the struggle of not drowning remains Fox Eye's modus operandi as this game and its successors has had this implemented in all of them in some shape or form. This is even referenced for an elevator code: "S E N S U I", when written in Japanese, means to submerge or dive underwater.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Played straight with Marie's sprite when the swimsuit is destroyed, but averted on the in-game CG art, as her nips are clearly visible under her swimsuit fabric.
• Bittersweet Ending: Marie eventually escapes from the flooded facility after her SOS sends jet fighters to rescue her, but the world was now ruined by nuclear war, and she must now live among a recovering community and work with archeologists to find ways to fix what was lost. Also, her father, Tanner, wasn't heard from again beyond the holograms she found in the facility, and is largely implied to have been Killed Mid-Sentence by the outbreak during his final hologram to Marie.
• Blessed with Suck: You know, for devices intended to keep Marie alive, those heavy, buoyancy-killing computer anklets sure end up killing her a lot in the now-flooded installation. However, this was likely an inconvenience to her and an oversight for Tanner when he installed those anklets onto her, as the future Marie lives in has the flooding in the facility being caused by rising ocean levels rather than anything within the facility, itself.
• Bloody Horror: Marie splats out blood whenever she is killed by lasers or spikes. The blood splats stay even after reloading the game and any saved slots. You can either toggle the blood off, or remove it permanently by removing the entire game from your computer.
• Call-Back: The Unexpected Shmup Level near the very end of the game is essentially a very simplified take on Dancing Marina, a 2007 Vertical Scrolling Shooter made by Fox before his founding of Fox Eye, itself.
• Changing of the Guard: After Marie is rescued by the jet fighters, she lives on working with archeologists on further scientific research in a now war-torn world to find ways to fix it, just like her dad, who has been long gone from her life after the efforts taken to rejuvenate her before the nuclear outbreak happened.
• Clothing Damage: Initially, you can only take one hit, which will vaporize your white swimsuit and leave you naked (and dead). The first upgrade obtained upgrades your swimsuit, letting it take the damage instead of you, at the cost of that half getting vaporized. Marie proceeds to run around topless, bottomless or completely naked, seemingly without giving a care. This is actually a deliberate part of the gameplay - Marie will often have to let the swimsuit take a hit for her so she can run past various obstacles with the only loss being her dignity (not that anyone's around to see her anyway). As such, as fun as it is, running around naked can be counter-productive. As a bonus, the image of Marie that shows up whenever she speaks also reflects her current clothing status. Even the ending image changes depending on whether she still had a swimsuit or burst out of the facility in the buff, although the ending itself remains the same.
• Darker and Edgier: A darker game compared to Fox Eye's previous fare at the time, such as the cutesy Puzzle Platformer Aqua Cube, and the Slice of Life Summer Adventure Game that is Blue Port. This game in contrast is a Bad Future Sci-Fi Metroidvania with gloomy, decayed environments and a sense of loneliness and isolation for its protagonist throughout its entirety, hence its title. Also, besides drowning, other things that can kill Marie include being impaled by spikes and shot by security lasers, both of which leave a blood splat behind right as she gets fatally hit. All blood spawned from these violent deaths will stay until the game is completely removed from the player's computer, but it can be toggled off, however. The ending of the game also has Marie describe some rather bleak notes of what has happened to the world during her slumber, but she nonetheless finishes off on an encouraging, if not somewhat bittersweet note.
• Disappeared Dad: Tanner. He was forced to leave his daughter Marie behind for her to heal in her capsule before a nuclear disaster could take place in the future. His final efforts to help Marie afterwards is to leave behind several holograms that help guide her out of the now-abandoned facility. And then it's implied in his final holographic message that he was Killed Mid-Sentence after giving Marie one more hint to escape the facility...
• Down the Drain: Water is the game's most prominent hazard, and you have to figure out how to navigate through all of the facility's submerged areas without letting Marie drown. With that said, you may end up seeing her drown a lot. Which leads to...
• Drowning Pit: Occasionally, you may encounter bodies of water that Marie won't be able to escape from in any way. You'll hope you've saved at a good point before accidentally falling into these pits.
• Dub Text: invoked There is an option within the game's folder to change all of the dialogue in the game and its font, which can range between the player fixing any further instances of Good Bad Translation to completely rewriting the game's script from scratch. This also allows you to change Marie's expressions during the dialogue and temporarily change the game's music through the use of Tanner's hologram portrait or that of an unknown, unseen person that he speaks to during some of the holograms. One player has even managed to use this to change the dialogue text to Chinese.
• Energy Weapon: There are 2 types of security robots with this weapon in the game, and make up one-third of the game's hazards (the other two thirds being the Spikes of Doom and maintaining the Oxygen Meter while underwater). One type of security robot has an active laser that hits Marie the moment she moves into its line of sight. The second type uses a yellow cone of light that shoots Marie with greater precision should she touch the light. Some rooms contain switches that allow you to turn off these lasers for a limited time in order to get through areas that would've been otherwise impossible to do without getting vaporized.
• Expy:
  • Several fans can't help but admit that Marie heavily resembles a slightly older human Roll wearing one of her one-piece swimsuits. Marie and Roll both also have scientist fathers that eventually disappear during a distant future and leave behind several holographic messages for specific people they’re related to to find and read. Some of Tanner's holograms even lead to or outright give Marie powerups.
  • Due to the game being an atmospherically-dark Metroidvania, others imagine that Marie is a younger Zero Suit Samus, since both Marie and Samus have blue eyes, wear their blonde hair in a ponytail, wear Fanservicey skintight suits, and focus more on sneaking past dangerous enemies instead of destroying them.
  • As lampshaded and discussed by Fox in crossover artwork◊, Marie (with some minor Art Evolution since Holdover's release) also resembles a previous blue-eyed, blonde-haired, pony-tailed Fox Eye heroine: Rico from the original Blue Port. Natica, from an 18+ mini-animation called Underwater Pinch of Natica!, likewise resembles both of the former two, but then ends up looking even more like Marie when she gets her own blue one-piece swimsuit in Natica and Sandy: Underwater Rescue and NATICA STAR SPLASH.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Not as bad as, say, I Wanna Be the Guy, but the walls are lined with spikes, and there are security robots all over the place which will be more than glad to vaporize you with a quick laser beam. You don't ever get a way to fight back, either, so you're forced to sneak around pretty much everything in the entire game.
• Fanservice: Marie's wearing a skin-tight leotard that will come apart in pieces, runs through sections of the game half or completely naked, with her portrait reflecting her state of (un)dress. Yeah. And upon winning, a very suggestive picture of her in a compromising pose underwater will appear in the game's folder as a reward.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The blue hearts you collect in the game increase the maximum length of Marie's Oxygen Meter. Beyond being a gameplay element, the hearts are meant to be a metaphorical representation of Marie's experiences of navigating through the flooded facility, and her need to adjust and hone her lungs to get the task done knowing how often she will have to travel underwater.
• Good Bad Translation: invoked Fox admits that his English isn't top notch, and the game was originally released in English with a very shoddy script, but thanks to the proofreading assistance of DeafDefiler, this trope gets mostly averted as the game gained a much more coherent English translation later on. However, as explained above in Dub Text, this can be further circumvented by the players themselves.
  "Do you overwrite?"
  "Do you return to title?"
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Marie is the first successor after Blue Port's Rico as an example of this trope within Fox Eye's subsequently-long list of blonde heroines. However, this is initially subverted, because her recovering illness, crippling handicap, and the nature of her adventure has made Marie feel hopeless and wary at first.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear:
  • If Marie loses the top half of her swimsuit (or the entire thing at once) she conveniently changes her CG pose so her chest gets covered by her arms.
  • During the ending scene, the arm Marie is using to open the final door is conveniently placed in front of her chest, so even if she arrived there naked, the player still can't see anything.
• Hidden Eyes: Marie's eyes completely vanish under a shadow whenever she gets hit, dies, or drowns.
• Jump Physics: Marie's physical condition and life-preserving anklets only lets her make small hops from the ground, though she fares better at this underwater. Upon getting the leg upgrade, however. She can jump twice as high on land and gain a huge amount of height underwater.
• Leotard of Power: Marie's upgraded dark blue swimsuit literally becomes this, as the game describes it as a sort of "armor". It has its own thin light-blue meter that's split into two halves representing the swimsuit's own top half and bottom half. Taking damage in either half will only tear off that section without killing Marie, but taking too much damage in the same exposed area quickly drains her Life Meter and kills her, anyway, even if the opposite half of the swimsuit was still intact. As such, if Marie loses the entire "armored" swimsuit and becomes naked, surviving against lasers and spikes from any angle won't be any different from her sticking with her original white swimsuit.
• Malevolent Architecture: ...why are there rows of giant spikes in a research installation, again?
• Metroidvania: Fox Eye's first. The game takes place in a labyrinth of an abandoned flooded facility. You must figure out different ways to reach certain areas and collect powerups and blue hearts to improve Marie's skills and her survivability underwater, respectively, so you can go further through the game and reach places you couldn't reach, before. Owing itself to its inspiration, as mentioned above in Expy, it helps that the girl herself looks like a younger Samus.
• Morton's Fork: Much of the game’s high difficulty is due to it being very timing-based to keep you on your toes of having to avoid more than one form of death simultaneously. For example, there’s a room where Marie has to crawl underwater in order to avoid a long row of searchlights from security lasers. If she keeps her head underwater for too long, she’ll drown, but if she chooses the wrong time to bring her head above water to catch a breath, she gets vaporized by Energy Weapons, instead. An 2022 art commission was requested to illustrate the tension of this further.
• One Hitpoint Wonder: Initially played completely straight when you start out in the white swimsuit, but tossed out the window when you get the upgraded dark blue suit. Running around naked leaves you as one of these, however. Slightly subverted in that you do have a health bar, but it drains very quickly when you come into contact with a hazard. Thus, Marie (and her upgraded swimsuit) can survive brief brushes with hazards, but not much more than that. Unsurprisingly played straight in the shooter segment near the end of the game.
• Oxygen Meter: The most important feature of the game, and the cornerstone of the developer's Signature Style as Marie spends a lot of time underwater. At the beginning of the game, Marie starts out with the shortest and fastest-dropping meter out of all of Fox Eye's protagonists, and it's completely separate from her very fragile Life Meter, all due to her uneasy physical condition. If it gets too low while she's underwater, she'll move at a slower pace due struggling to hold her breath until she either drowns or reaches an air pocket to breathe in. Getting enough blue hearts upgrades the meter and makes it easier to progress through a majority of the game.
• Permanently Missable Content: After the SOS signal is sent, the game goes on, but if you left any blue hearts in other rooms, you won't be able to get them back. Also, if you predict that you might not be able to get the hearts back, you may save on a new slot next to the machine that sends the signal. However, due to a glitch, when you load a save, if you're near a sign or machine, the game will automatically read it/use it. This means that if you saved next to the final machine, the Point of No Return will be triggered when the game is loaded.
• Post-Victory Collapse: A non-fighting example. After Marie finally meets other people - the jet fighters who got her SOS - to help her out of the facility, she promptly passes out from hunger and exhaustion. Granted, this exhaustion was brought on by her from having to constantly survive against deadly lasers, dodge endless amounts of Spikes of Doom, and avoid drowning in the facility's many flooded areas. As the rest of the ending explains, however, she does get better.
• Retraux: The game's retro graphics were intentionally made to resemble the graphics of computer games of The '80s and The '90s, such as what can be found on the MSX. This also extends to the ambient music that plays through nearly the whole game, as it wouldn't sound too out of place from Super Metroid. Fox even stated that that the game was designed to be as if it were made in 1994, the same year that Super Metroid made its debut and further codified the Metroidvania sub-genre it established that Holdover bases itself on.
• Point of No Return: After the Unexpected Shmup Level, you can't go back to most rooms, as Marie is now entirely focused on following the voices of the jet fighters she sent an SOS to.
• Save Scumming: The game makes sure to point out the Quicksave functionality. Which is good, because you're going to need it; you will die. A lot.
• Spikes of Doom: Whether they're on the ground, sticking out from walls, or hanging from the ceiling, stay away from them or say goodbye to your health (or armor) really fast.
• Stripperiffic:
  • Somehow a dark-blue swimsuit is supposed to qualify for armor. A swimsuit that gives way at the slightest bit of damage, leaving the user completely naked. Yeaaaaaaah. Upon putting it on and reading its details, Marie even has the foresight to question, if not outright doubt, the sturdiness of the "armor", herself.
    Marie (in Japanese): Is it really okay?
    Marie (in English): Hmm... I'm not so sure this will protect me...
  • The Japanese version of the game, including this Japanese pre-release image◊, outright states that this swimsuit is just for medical purposes and is completely useless for protection, at least against the Spikes of Doom and Energy Weapons, that is. Better than sticking with the white swimsuit, at least, as Marie is just otherwise instantly stripped naked upon a just-as-instant death.
• Thanking the Viewer: Marie at the very end, after describing the entirety of her situation following the jet fighter pilots' rescue of her after she escapes from the facility.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: The game is rather short, but its short length is compensated by its high difficulty and the frequent use of its Quicksave function to undo the many deaths you're expected to face. Not thinking ahead of what's in front of you tends to end badly, such as running or falling straight into a line of spikes. Since Marie's oxygen runs out faster while maneuvering underwater, taking the wrong turn, jump, or crawl while submerged may already be enough to drown her before she can backtrack to get air. Much of the challenge of this game involves memorizing layouts and figuring out the safest way to get through them.
• Underwater Ruins: The setting of the game is of an abandoned facility that has since decayed and flooded into a dark mechanical labyrinth. According to the ending, this is due to the rising ocean levels that have taken place in the future within the whole time Marie was sealed in her healing capsule.
• Unexpected Shmup Level: After sending out the SOS, and being given some grim dialog suggesting a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, it gets picked up by two jet fighters who were coincidentally in the area. You then have to shoot down 70 blimps which apparently disrupted the SOS signal sent by Marie before the game gets back on track.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: If you have less than 400 hearts, although you are still able to enter the administration section after unlocking Network Room B, you won't be able to exit it due to insufficient oxygen.
• Unique Enemy: Not an "enemy", per se, but more so a unique "hazard". Between all of the spike stabbings, laser shootings, and helpless drownings Marie can suffer from, there's exactly one situation in the entire game (specifically, in the upper floors of the facility right before the terrain changes to stone and grass) where she can instead get sandwiched and crushed between a platform moving up against a small stone ceiling if you don't jump or drop down from it soon enough.
• Walk, Don't Swim: Marie is known to be the first and only Fox Eye heroine that can't swim, not because she never learned how to (or in the case of Blue Port's Ai, made this trope into a deliberate skill), but because she literally can't due to the weight of the devices on her ankles forcing her to always sink to the bottom like an anchor. As such, Marie must work around this to walk, crawl, jump, and sink her way through submerged passageways, burning quite a bit of her oxygen doing so.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Besides collecting blue hearts to literally increase her underwater breath-holding skills, there are other upgrades that revitalize Marie's arms and legs, allowing her to respectively climb ledges and jump higher.

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