"Find a way out: Abode of darkness." is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unreal marketplace assets, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers. If you try to play this extremely lame first person "adventure" game, you'll quickly recognise the stock Unreal zombies used in dozens of other similar asset flips. And while it seems funny, remember the developer is trying to cash in on this... this is a for-profit venture, and gamers are the targets.
It's difficult to understate just how badly put together this is... with bold green text panels telling you what general things you should try to do, and what keys to press... how poorly everything is assembled, the lack of feedback... if Digital Homicide had made this asset flip, they'd be ashamed of just how bad the quality is.
You can see what they were trying to do... you're in a spooky house full of zombies, get a torch and keycard and escape/whatever... it's just so bad. There's a lot of these lazy first person horror adventure games on Steam, they're easy to do, almost as easy as an RPG Maker asset flip or a GameMaker Studio tutorial copy + paste job. But this garbage has no interest or value for gamers.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.
Find a way out: Abode of darkness. has the laughable, eye-watering price of around $8 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
[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 developer dribbles some garbage in Russian (what a surprise, this shovelware asset flip is from Russia, who could have guessed). I ran it through Google Translate. But before we get into that, hilariously, the developers own account has a VAC BAN. You can't make this up. This shovelware pusher was banned from Steam games for cheating. Holy crap.
The developer trots out, in barely comprehensible Russian, that they couldn't find anyone who wanted to make games with them and they didn't have enough money to pay for staff or anything, and they didn't have enough skill or talent to make video games properly. That absolutely explains the deplorably quality of this asset flip, but doesn't excuse it.
The developer complains I got this in a garbage random-game-key buyout. If the developer has a problem with gamers obtaining keys for their game and playing it, [b]they shouldn't sell keys for their trash games to shovelware key distributors[/b]. Perhaps if they didn't want to have their games actually played and reviewed by gamers, they shouldn't be making cash grabs trying to sell it on platforms like Steam.
Nothing in the developers pointless, rambling and incoherent response changes the objective facts about this garbage asset flip. My review stands unaltered, and I thank the developer for the sheer comedy of revealing that they're VAC banned.
