Fantastic Haven: Prologue

Same bugs as a year ago. Logged in again because I love the premise and want to support indie developers, but the food troughs are still broken so you can't feed your creatures. There needs to be a note in the tutorial about how they want you do it. The bar for the creatures' size of space needs is also still broken. I tried to leave a note again in the in-game "leave a bug report" menu option -- but that is also still broken! I am hopeful that this can all be fixed before the full game release. But at this point, it's been a year, so...?

"Fantastic Haven: Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Fantastic Haven". Fantastic Haven is a promising looking ripoff of Pokemon/Palworld, with survival crafting and animal taming... but that's also a product that hasn't been made yet and may never be. There's nobody using this advertisement, and usually when an advertisement for an unfinished product is rejected by gamers, as is the case here, the developer doesn't bother making the rest of the game, which may be the case with Fantastic Haven. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Fantastic Haven, 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 "Fantastic Haven: Prologue" too. 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. [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 game 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 game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game 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 (16 CFR Part 465), these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law.[/quote] The use of fake/paid reviews on an advertisement here is highly suspicious (and illegal) so it's worth giving a bit of pause to this. The developer is clearly acting in a number of unethical ways... it's a waste of time and effort for gamers to invest in projects from unethical developers. Certainly, don't give unethical developers any of your money. 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.