Ara and the Empty Universe

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Artwork was expressive and the interactions were pleasant.

Pretty good overall! A little confusing in places and it gets kind of repetitive but apart from that it was good. Check this one out if you like games like it, it’s only $1.

love the story 10/10 ending left me wondering was going to happen to every body left and what happened to every body the went missing

☀️

RPG Maker strikes again! So what happened here was the developer couldn't work out how to use RPG Maker to make a JRPG, the only thing it can do (and it's terrible at it), so instead we have a kind of e-book narrative heavy adventure game. The writing is incredibly cringey and, like more conventional RPG Maker asset flips, comes across as it was written by a high school anime club dropout. The other notable thing here is that this isn't a pure RPG Maker asset flip, because it seems instead of just filling this up with stock RPG Maker assets, they developer ran off to MS-Paint to make their own. It's really had to tell if this is better or worse than the godawful RPG Maker pixelcrap we usually see, so I guess we can settle for "different, but just as bad". As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality 2D retro art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $1 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 6 concurrent players... 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? Well, you can't, the developer wisely removed this after seeing how badly it had failed. That's a good move because it's just that little bit less pollution we have to wade through when searching for real games. Edit: Okay, the game assets weren't made with MS-Paint (but they're still not great, even if they are sincerely made) and the game itself was removed for religious reasons... and while I can't recommend anything out of RPG Maker, I think it's chilling whenever politics or religion stifle creativity. These institutions should protect and support creativity, not silence it.

It's not a bad game, by any means. Interesting story, quick li'l walking simulator... But my goodness is it inexplicably weird. I dunno, I feel like I have more questions than answers.