[quote][b]Warning: Developer Fraud[/b][/quote]
In an act of brazen theft and fraud, the "developer" revoked all keys to the "Marwin and the Evolution Stone" game sold through third party sites like IndieGala and GoGoBundle, keeping the money taken from those resellers but removing the game from paying customers accounts. This is essentially theft through hostile, fraudulent action on behalf of this unethical developer. There's no guarantee the developer won't repeat this act of theft on other titles too.
Under no circumstances should anyone by a game from this con artist and thief.
Blue Whale is a badly made 2D retro pixel side scrolling "adventure" game hybridised with craptastic, badly written visual novel text spam. It's barely a game, and wasn't made with the intention of being a game, it's more of a pretentious "art not game" bit of trash. Here's the thing as games as art. Games can be art, if they're exceptionally well made. Badly made art, shoved into a game-like format doesn't make "art" better, however, it just makes gaming worse, which is apparently the goal of the "developer" for this junk.
The game topic is also disturbing and delves into the topic of teen suicide, badly, for profit. That's right, the developer is trying to profit from this. You take on the role of a girl named Green (because the developer only knew one word in Japanese... and apparently not many words in English either, the writing here is horrifically bad, so bad that Google Translate should be ashamed of itself). You get invited to partake in a suicide game.
Trying to address social issues through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good. Game developers are not professionals in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this can cause far more harm than good. It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to push political or social agendas. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get sales by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game doesn't have any save game features, despite that being a basic standard for all games of this time. The developer might defend this as an attempt to make the game seem more "difficult" without them having to balance the game or do their job properly with engaging and challenging level design, but it's just as likely they simply couldn't work out how to make a save game feature work. Either way, that's a defect that adds another reason for gamers to avoid this game.
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 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 can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. 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. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Lissencephaly has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. 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 game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game 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 5 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 game is to be expected.
Blue Whale has the far too high price of around $4 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.
