DESOLATIUM: Prologue

good game apart from the 4 glitchy achievements they are still obtainable it just takes several playthroughs !!!

This is what we used to call a "pixel hunt" style adventure game. Basically mouse over the entire screen until your cursor changes and click to find the object you need, complete the puzzle, or advance to the next scene. The visual indicators on what's clickable are effectively non-existent and merge into the non-interactive portions of the backgrounds almost every time. These types of games are basically what helped kill off the adventure game genre in the late 90s. It's not clever, just frustrating trial and error. I don't know how many times I went from the starting area back to the town square because I had no idea which path I had just come from and which I still needed to go to. The presentation is pretty bland. The environments/scenes are all grainy 360 real life stills with one moment of pretty jarring and laughable 3D. The hand drawn art looks pretty good if not a bit generic. The animated cutscenes look nice and are well drawn, if not low framerate. The Cthulhu animation they layer in to the 360 image in one section has visible clipping and is lower resolution than the environment is in, it's like looking at a screen. The voice acting is serviceable but on the lower rung of professional. I'd guess they either had friends/family/dev team do the voice work or they hired newer VAs. The story in this short experience doesn't really go anywhere, which I have to attribute to it being a prologue, but it doesn't make for a satisfying experience. I'm a big fan of the "mythos" but I'm not encouraged by this prologue and even for free isn't worth the time.

"DESOLATIUM: Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "DESOLATIUM". DESOLATIUM is an unusual puzzle/adventure game where you unravel a mystery by clicking around some 3D photographs and other simple puzzles. The game failed because clicking around and scrutinizing photographs for really vague clues turned out not to be all that much fun. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not DESOLATIUM, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "DESOLATIUM: Prologue" too. The weird part about this advert is, despite it not actually being the full product or even a complete game, is the developer was ambitiously charging $2 USD for it. That's right, pay $2 so you can look at an advertisement that's intended to get you to spend $15 USD (ouch!) on the complete product. They wanted us to pay them to advertise to us now? This kind of thing is getting beyond a joke. This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos 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. Even though this is now "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 5 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.

I was lured in with the promise of Lovecraftian mysteries, but was severely disappointed. I've seen some bad point and click games, but this one takes the cake. The voice acting is horrible, the stock images are.. cringe. I do not recommend it at all.

Loved the game all achievements work but only if you use this guide it explains how to get the achievements https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3286066647

Нормально.

I'm really sorry to give the demo a thumbs down because as much as the visuals and atmosphere are spot on and even fantastic for a videogame inspired by the Cthulhu mythos, it is a far cry from a worthy sacrifice on the Great One's altar. I was kind of suspecting by playing the demo that the final game may boil down to pixel hunts slapped together with some boring and rudimentary puzzles so I checked out the complete game's review section and unsurprisingly I was greeted by the flood of negative reviews stating the exact points the demo is pointing towards. Also, It seems that 5/10 of the achievements for the demo have stopped popping up after an update but the developers didn't really bother fixing this even though they were informed about it by players. Regarding the voice acting, it is mostly atrocious and borderline chuckle inducingly bad. This is especially true for the character you play as. Some of the spoken lines are embarassingly bad and I can't believe they were the takes the developers put into the game. Another problem with the demo is that it goes against the rule for demos and that's the fact that it doesn't really give you a good sample for how the main game will be. The only puzzle in this demo is laughably easy. Easy as combining item A with item B. On the other hand, a couple of the notes were hidden in a very pixel-hunty manner which hinted at things to come. All in all, it's truly a shame for this game to become a highly missed opportunity at a stab at the Cthulhu mythos. I really hoped for a lot more and I was greatly disappointed especially in the metric that mattered the most: Gameplay.