Anahita is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs, and boy, if these "developers" really are the troglodytes behind the cancer that is ClickTeam Fusion, well, the quality of this mobile app explains a lot. The mobile app is a (badly) hand drawn 2D side view narrative driven "adventure" game... which makes this sound a lot fancier than it is. It's just a bunch of simple puzzles with some incredibly clunky movement and a tonne of badly done cutscenes inbetween as you guide a girl to find her lost toy.
From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The artwork here is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish MS-Paint/"My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the mobile app unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
Some of the defects in the mobile app can be attributed to the choice of using the Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this mobile app is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality mobile app is to be expected.
Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $2 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a premium for a free mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend. Who do they think we are?
