"しんせいかつ" (shinseikatsu, "New Life") is not really a game, it's a short, I don't know, demo? It's just an apartment scene rendered in UE5. No game loops, nothing to do, just look at what might possibly be a bunch of flipped assets. Amazing what people will waste $100 Steam Direct dollars publishing, isn't it?
What do you do in the game? Nothing.
The "developer" didn't bother with an English translation, but we don't need one. The language of shovelware is universal.
The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?"
While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't.
The game assets here look a lot better than the actual game they're assembled on... that doesn't mean this is necessarily an asset flip or a kitbash, because there's no proof. But what matters is that this has all the same terrible quality as asset flips, and at the end of the day that's one of the reasons people don't like asset flips, the quality is bad. That's a problem.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 4 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
This one scores 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.
At the end of the day, my reviews are intended to help gamers find quality and avoid the dregs (with over 140,000 games on Steam... not all of them are masterpieces). If you think my review is wrong, definitely add this to your library, download it and play it... it's surely exactly the kind of game you'll love (but I doubt it will work out that way). Game reviews are for gamers to share their thoughts and help others choose where to spend valuable time. If my review helps you to grab or reject this game, then my job is done.
