거울 너머

This is from Hoseo University in Korea. Students got a homework assignment to make "거울 너머" (Beyond the Mirror). The students were clearly mistaught that it's fine to release obsolete 2D games in the 3D era. 3D graphics cards became uniquitous in every single gaming PC ever since the 1990's when the ATI Rage and Voodoo3 hit the scene. Any professional development business that sees a prospective hire who doesn't know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's with the Voodoo3 and ATI Rage probably isn't going to give them a job. Bad for the students, and what is this delivering for us gamers in the 3D gaming era? So the students made a pixelcrap RPG Maker asset flip looking game (seriously they put all this effort into something you could drag-and-drop into existence with RPG Maker???) and combined that with some high school anime club dropout fan-fiction writing about being dragged into a 2D mirror world. It's got a horror theme and the horror is that a university really thought it would be okay to teach the students that this woeful level of failed quality is remotely acceptable in the gaming industry. We also have to question what value there is for gamers on Steam when institutions flood the store with low quality 2D video game homework assignments... sure, it might make the students feel good about themselves, but this has no benefit for gamers who have to wade through this stuff to find professionally made 3D games. The "developer" didn't bother with an English translation, but we don't need one. The language of shovelware is universal. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. Next is pricing and what value this has for gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 2 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this. Given that this free student project won't count toward your game collection or add any achievements, and because it's not really a full game and more of a homework assignment, it's not a worthwhile download. Finally, I'm here to help save gamers time by filtering out the noise and substandard games. If you don't agree with my assessment of the defects in this game, go ahead and download it... maybe you'll find the same defects to be as unacceptable as I did, maybe not. Even write your own review. Positive or negative, game reviews are here to help other gamers by informing their decisions on what to spend their time on.