"Elohim Eternal - Prologue" is not an RPG Maker asset flip. It's an advertisement for an RPG Maker asset flip! This is a lot like if the measles decided it wasn't popular enough so embarked on an advertising campaign. Anyway, while it's inappropriate to discuss the product this is advertising, we can summarise it by just saying it's an RPG Maker asset flip, and like all of those, has zero value whatsoever as a serious PC game.
But it's not appropriate to discuss Elohim Eternal because this is not Elohim Eternal, it's an advertisement for it. And I can't recommend people download advertisements on Steam. If you want ads, Youtube has plenty and you can stream those without going through the effort of adding them to your library and downloading them.
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 "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are THE MAIN CHARACTER. You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet THE MAIN CHARACTER.
The developer makes the rather serious claim that my review is inaccurate/contains information which isn't factually evident. But this simply isn't true... the facts of my review can easily be verified with just a glance at this godawfully crap product.
We know that if there was any glaring inaccuracy in my review the developer would have jumped on it and pointed it out right away... but they can't even cite one single example. Because [i]they know my review is accurate[/i]. They just don't like being presented with the facts.
So they make up these false accusations of inaccuracy to soothe their ego. Anything but facing up to the truth. But why is this intellectual dishonesty good for gamers? It isn't.
The developer whines that this is not an advertisement, but just more content for an existing game, [b]but that is blatantly untrue[/b]. Even if this advertisement contains content that isn't in the game (but should have been, or as a free DLC), it's somehow not an advertisement. This is complete garbage, the purpose of this is to encourage people to buy his garbage RPG Maker asset flip. The developers intellectual dishonesty here is appalling, but we've already established this garbage is a product of main character syndrome.
RPG Maker is intended as a toy to teach some game design principles and to make small demos to pass around with friends. It should never be used by people who are unable to perform the professional job of game developer to pretend they are, and especially should not be used to make garbage cash grabs like Elohim Eternal: The Babel Code that pollute Steam with trash nobody wants.
And since the developer has decided to use Steam Developer responses as an avenue to draw attention to their valueless garbage asset flip cash grabs, we can take some comfort in knowing his attempts to use RPG Maker to pretend to be a real game developer failed dismally. SteamDB shows that his flagship product RPG Maker asset flip (The Babel Code) peaked at only 9 players. A complete and utter failure, for obvious reasons.
As always, game reviews (and advertisement reviews) are not written for developers, even if they are the main character in the whole universe. They're written to inform the most important people in the industry... you, the gamer. Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this advertisement for a failed RPG Maker asset flip to anyone.
