Ayu - The Dream Soul - is an Early Access 2D retro pixel top down narrative heavy adventure game where you guide a schoolgirl through a bizarre psychological horror e-book. It's not bizarre because it's a gripping surreal story, it's bizarre because it's so badly made and badly written.
The game has been in Early Access since 2022 and while it's still getting updates, it's deep in Development Hell. There's no reasonable expectation that this will ever be completed. Whether the developer lacks the time, funds, or skill/talent required to complete a video game isn't really something gamers should be expected to accept as an excuse. The developer failed the basic requirement for Early Access by dodging the part where they must provide an ETA, which is tantamount to admitting they have no intention to complete this.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2022 (and this was released not so far back in 2020), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.
Ayu - The Dream Soul - has an overly optimistic price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam, and the unethical actions of the developer.
