"Boring in paradise" is a godawfully badly made collection of two crap minigames slapped together terribly with the blight on gaming that is GameMaker Studio (from Yoyogames)... yes, the Comic Sans of the game construction kit world. There's a 2D top down car driving game, where if you hit a pedestrian, and you're epileptic, the developer tries to kill you. There's no forewarning about the strobing flashes that occur, so if you're sensitive to those kinds of things, absolutely avoid this game. There's also a very lame "dodging" game where you move left or right to try avoid the word "Pain", which is representative of the experience of trying to play garbage shovelware made with GameMaker Studio. I've reviewed well over 500 games made with GameMaker Studio, and they've all been awful. This game is square in the middle of typical for GMS.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to try to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics, at least it looks like that's what they were trying to do. I don't know if there's a way to describe "art" that looks almost like it's pixel, but so badly made that it doesn't even make it that far. It's clear that this is due to lack of budget or talent, and 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.
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 often used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.
Boring in paradise is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
[b]Note:[/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not count towards your Game Collector counts, achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
