Cards of the Dead - Prologue

+1 🆓

Cards of the Dead: Prologue is not strictly a game. It's an advertisement/demo for the full game of the same name (Cards of the Dead). It's a common mistake when unfamiliar with Steam to launch demos/advertisements as full games on Steam instead of tagging them correctly as demos. Here's the instructions for putting a demo up on Steam, to demonstrate that there is a correct process for this, which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos This is a basic RNG based card game with a zombie theme. Drawing various cards will reveal attack cards, antidote and healing cards as you must juggle your two stats, health and zombification. When either of those runs out your game is over, and of course this is the kind of game that wears you down just for playing it, a lot like those crappy turn based stat juggler mobile apps like Dead in Bermuda. The game this is advertising is less about strategy and more just try-and-die until you beat the RNG. What fun. No wonder it was a flop. 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. While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. At the end of the day, I can only recommend full, correctly published games to gamers. Because this is just an advertisement, and because of the other problems with it, I can't recommend it.