RPG Maker strikes again!
"Ghost Hospital -in Thousand Horror Hill-" is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.
Notably, the "developer" couldn't work out how to use RPG Maker to make a JRPG (the only thing it can do, and it's terrible at it). Instead, we have a short, badly written fan-fiction about a spooky hospital. Hey, at least it's not a cringey fan-fiction about the developers imaginary girlfriend (this, sadly, is the most common subject for most RPG Maker asset flips and kitbashes infesting Steam).
As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality 2D retro "art", looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
It's worth noting this contains some bespoke "art" instead of the usual copy + pasted Kadokawa stock RPG Maker assets, making this slightly less of an asset flip. We can tell it's bespoke "art" because it looks considerably worse than the usual asset flipped RPG Maker assets. This is an even worse outcome from a gamer perspective. Gaming is a visual medium and developers should at least attempt to be competent and delivering quality, contemporary 3D visuals.
There's no English translation for the this, but that's okay. The language of bad products 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.
Now on to pricing and value for 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.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 9 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
This is 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.
