"小品模拟器" or "Sketch Simulator" is, according to the developer, a game where you click on the entry to complete the program your own sister. Whatever that means. Was Google Translate having a stroke? Or was the developer having a stroke and Google just translated it faithfully? We'll never know until the developer gets out of the stroke ward. Anyway, this is just a text game where you click on Chinese phrases to complete a comedy routine in a short space of time. The implementation quality is bad, the jokes are even worse than mine, and the value for gamers is none.
There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal.
The graphics aren't great, just a mostly static backdrop and text you click on, could have been done in a web browser. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak user count was only ONE person. That's right, only one person ever used this at a time. When I tried this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak user count for the product. OUCH.
The only user 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality product is to be expected.
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?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
