This is a badly made Russian "text adventure", and I think that's generous as you don't have a free range text input, you're just clicking on text dialogue options. I guess the fine difference that makes this only slightly more than a banal visual novel is that you can return to previous sections of text and choose different options, which creates a synthetic impression of moving between rooms and so on.
In terms of actual text adventures, this has less going on with it than Zork did, and on that basis alone, that's a huge failure. Zork came out in the 1980s, this came out in 2024, if you can't do better than developers were doing 40 years ago, it may not be appropriate to publish your failure through Steam Direct. And fail, this did. See below for the public reception, it's not good.
The narrative topic is a bad one... you wake up in a complex that you have to work in (this has been done a thousand times or more, and every game that did, did a better job than this). The "game" involves clicking through text options to "fix" minor system problems in the complex. It's supposed to have a dark, satirical humour, but the bad Russian writing leaves us with the feeling the only dark satire about all of this is that someone genuinely thought this garbage would be okay to publish on Steam Direct.
So, it's hard to describe this as a game, the focus is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming rig is not a kindle.
This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does.
These flaws make this game fall far short of the professional standards we expect from a modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 4 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and now, 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 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it among the best the Steam catalogue has to offer?
Fixer's Tale has the almost scam-like price of around $5 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.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Metro 2033", "Borderlands 2" or "Killing Floor". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. On a purely unrelated note, recent US FTC rulings mean that review manipulation and fake reviews are now federal crimes. Interesting, isn't it? Regardless... take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.
Remember what I often say... if you don't agree with what I've said about this game, by all means buy it and play it. My review is just here to inform your buying decision, and if you think I was wrong and you bought the game, then I've done what I really wanted to do... inform your buying decision.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
