A Shade Darker Than Gray

"A Shade Darker Than Gray" is an e-book (but with a bit of walking so wow, we escape the "e-book" boilerplate I have to use every time some author gets confused and thinks Steam is Harper Collins or something). It's short, it's bad, and wow, the graphics are remarkable...y awful. What do you do in the game? Walk around a bit and get exposed to some really pretentious high school goth poetry equivalent writing. So, it's hard to describe this as a game, the focus of the product is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming rig is not a kindle. The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 15 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download. And when the best thing you can say about a game is there's not much of it, we have a problem. The graphics here are particularly awful, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment. It looks like the whole thing was done on an Etch-A-Sketch. This is not a good thing, this is a very bad thing. It's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 3 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. I didn't pay money, but I still feel ripped off.

☀️

Yeah, no! I like a game that is wildly different than others, disturbing, and even has questionable "art", but this one just doesn't play well

Казуальная игра с элементами чёрной комедии и интерактивной литературы. Плюсы: Мрачная атмосфера — монохромный мир усиливает ощущение безысходности; Глубокий сюжет — исследование психологического состояния главного героя; Разнообразие концовок — шесть различных исходов истории. Минусы: Краткость прохождения — всего около 15 минут; Ограниченная цветовая палитра — всего четыре-пять оттенков; Отсутствие контроллера — управление только клавиатурой. Итог: A Shade Darker Than Gray предлагает необычное погружение в мрачный мир с интересными сюжетными поворотами и глубоким смыслом. Несмотря на краткость и ограничения в управлении, игра захватывает своей атмосферой и уникальным геймплеем.

I think the art in the game is interesting. I thought the lack of audio other than occasional white noise was a nice choice. The story was, however, unbearable. It read like a fanfic with no string of logical events. It was just back to back to back to back of doing something, an realistic reaction by NPC's, and then somehow an even more unrealistic reaction to follow. I get that its a game based in an e-ink world, but you can only suspend disbelief for so long. Personal pet peeve: I find the varyingly correct and incorrect grammar to be off-putting. Hardly a game breaking facet, but still irritating.