Emerald Dreams: Sanity - Platformer Quest

"Emerald Dreams: Sanity - Platformer Quest" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. At face value this is a boring 3D rendered 2D action/puzzle platformer with a fantasy/magic theme, intended to be a bit of a Metroidvania/Hollow Knight ripoff, but the developers couldn't be bothered finishing it. But what's more interesting, at least to me, is the way the developer paid the Russian review farm uncovered by Sentinels of the Store for fake reviews (a deliberate and unethical act of review manipulation, indeed, this game will be banned from Steam whenever Valve gets around to enforcing their rules and US law). Considering there's no up front price, why pay for fake reviews? Of course.. the developer did intend to make this a paid product by locking and paywalling content behind DLCs... yeah, so often what appears to be "Free", isn't really. Of course, given the developer couldn't get organic, genuine positive reviews and had to pay Russians to write fake ones, it's no surprise the quality of the game is so low... I mean, that's why they had to pay for reviews. The game is a buggy and unpolished mess that barely works. There's a lot of stuff that's obviously incomplete like the inventory system, poor animations, bad graphics... the list goes on and on. In the modern era of high quality bleeding edge PC gaming, these kinds of flat, lazy, lackluster platformers just don't cut it. Platforming is a dead genre for a reason. Even though this is "free", it failed to attract any interest for gamers here on Steam Direct for obvious reasons. It seems this was abandoned by the devs 1 year and 7 months ago. It will stay incomplete forever. These unfinished, abandoned game attempts just clog the storefront and make it difficult for players to find honest, fully developed games. The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. So this is "free", but it's abandoned. Worse, it was never intended to be free. The developer intended to charge for this if it ever left Early Access... but the developer just couldn't be bothered. Making this abandoned pollution that gamers need to filter through when searching for products made by more ethical developers who fulfill their promise to deliver on their Early Access commitment instead of breaking that promise. They also have their hand out for a $2 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to give them money from buying empty DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks. In terms of public reception, the "free" price tag didn't help. This peaked at a handful of players and then immediately cratered. With a peak count of less than 50 gamers (out of over 130 million gamers and over 40 million daily logons), it’s safe to say the PC gaming community has collectively decided to ignore this, probably because of the reasons supplied in this review. [quote][b][url=https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-notices/16-cfr-part-465-trade-regulation-rule-use-consumer-reviews-testimonials-final-rule]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/b] This product features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the product launched on Steam, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product. Due to the 2024 FTC ruling, these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law ([i]16 CFR § 465.2, 15 U.S.C. § 45[/i])[/quote] 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? What's the verdict? This is a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher quality alternatives on Steam.

it was like a crappy terraria and every time you die you start over

Reminds me of childhood play, such bliss

Ce jeu a une possibilité d'évolution ENORME tellement il y a de bug. Entre les dialogues qui s'inversent entre les persos, l'inventaire ou la moitié des items sont des carrés blanc, le nombre d'items aléatoire qui disparait lorsque tu en utilise un, les barres de vies qui se baladent dans le jeu ... Bref ... Content d'avoir fait le 100% pour passer à autre chose

[b] На гру походу забили, гра не грабельна, анімації калічні [/b] Можливо колись розробники повернуться та дороблять її, а так вона нічим не цікава [b] 1/10 [/b]

Гра кумедна, бажаю розробників успіху! Буду періодично заходити ще, дивитись як фіксять баги. Поки що найболючіше це смерть і вихід на початок :( а загалом мені подобається