Embark on a first-person adventure to a mysterious café in Cairo. Adopt a new perspective and shape reality to your will as you unravel an occult conspiracy hidden in plain sight.
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Languages: English**languages with full audio support
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"Egregore" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from USC in America. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. This student project takes an unusual approach to game design (but not necessarily a good one). It's a point and click puzzle game where you interact with groups of people, places and so on to form the correct reality that unravels an occult conspiracy. You do this by changing reality, dragging and dropping people to different places and forming different connections until you get the right combination and reveal the truth... the truth is that students of USC won't get decent jobs in the industry if their technical delivery looks as bad as it does in Egregore. The game doesn't feature a save option, which the students probably didn't think was something they needed to learn, because the game is less than 25 minutes long (so it's a tough ask to expect people to want to download it... but then again, this wasn't made for the gamers, it was made for the students. Unfortunately another thing the students didn't bother learning about was "optimisation" and "bug fixing", so the game runs like garbage and is likely to crash before you finish it... so you'll probably need to start again from scratch. Or not bother and uninstall it. Or drag and drop yourself to a point in time before you bothered trying the game to save yourself the hassle. See what I did there? Egregore. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
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Hours played at review time, across 20 reviews with recorded playtime.
I recommend Egregore for its lore & story, its look & feel, and its unusual game mechanics (linking people, places, objects, and ideas in different combinations to progress the plot). But I have two caveats. Firstly the lack of an automatic or manual "save" function, so having to exit the game partway through, or having a fatal error in the game, means restarting it from the beginning next time. Secondly, there do appear to be some unreliability issues - I had to restart the game twice because of soft locks in the end stages, where the game either wouldn't let me link a new disk to the existing chain of disks, or disks disappeared when moving them around, in both cases stopping me from moving on. The game is short (my playtime represents four playthroughs, after having to restart it three times), but it is interesting, and would be even better if the issues I mentioned could be addressed.
Egregore is a short puzzle game involving cults, excellent coffee, and a talking bookshelf. The primary gameplay involves solving puzzles by connecting concepts, people, and places to alter them. For example, you can link a person to a place to move them there. The puzzles are tricky but rewarding, although I would've liked to see some extensions, like concepts that have special behavior when linked, or have specific conditions to be linkable. Overall, it's a pretty interesting way to spend about an hour (although you could probably solve the whole game in 30 minutes if you're really quick), and given it's free, there's no harm in giving it a shot. I look forwards to more interesting games by this team!
fav part was when the occult said "ITS EGREGORE TIME" and egregored all over the place
People don't often make games like this anymore. This is a short, memorable puzzle/adventure game with a mind-bending central mechanic that made me consider the ways we connect information in our brains. If you can find your way through the mazelike middle of the game, the ending is well worth it. The aesthetics were also very impressive for a student game. The music and environmental art as you walk through the alleyway at the beginning of the game really set the stage for an unsettling, never-know-what-you'll find next adventure title in the vein of LucasArts games from the 90's. There was some lag on my machine during the final sequence (no spoilers), but I encountered no bugs of any kind during the 35 minutes or so it took me to complete the story.
Be forewarned this is some kind of school project. Barely a game and it barely makes sense.
Really promising conceit, but never fulfilled (even a bit). So barebones that it looks more like a gamejam submission than a school project ; I couldn't even remember what it was [i]really[/i] about one hour after I finished it.
Yegregore.
Kahire'deki gizemli bir kafede birinci şahıs macerasına atılın. Göz önünde gizlenmiş gizli bir komployu ortaya çıkarırken yeni bir bakış açısı benimseyin ve gerçekliği isteğinize göre şekillendirin.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.