RPG Maker strikes again!
"Girl And Demon 1" is one of hundreds of low effort RPG Maker flips spamming the store. RPG Maker is designed specifically to be used by children, in their own words, "These easy to use tools are simple enough for a child". It's just a bunch of canned assets mixed with cringey high school anime club fan fiction.
This is from Succubella Games who were apparently acquired by DIG Games, Succubella is famous for having published dozens of incredibly low effort RPG Maker asset flips onto Steam and this is no exception... a minimum viable product that probably took a weekend to make, and features a generic fantasy backstory stapled to the basic RPG Maker Final Fantasy ripoff engine, and of course it's badly translated from Russian.
As with all RPG Maker games, this is the result of a really bad game engine being misused. Like all RPG Maker "games", it looks bad in fullscreen and lacks HD support or graphics options. This is not acceptable for modern PC gamers.
The argument must be made that construction kit toys like RPG Maker are intended for making small games, toys and demos to pass around with friends, and should never be used as a substitute for professional game development.
This is typical RPG Maker shovelware... It uses copy and pasted pixelcrap art, looks bad and plays even worse. This construction kit is designed for children is trash, and products made with it offer no value to PC gamers.
DIG Games have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. An example of DIG Games doing this is [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1022040]Candy Mandy[/url], which is really "[url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/match-3-jelly-garden-kit-43260]Match 3 Jelly Garden Kit[/url]", written by the actual developers, Candy Smith. Also, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1512320]Yabgits: Haunted Cemetery[/url], which is really "[url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/packs/block-breaker-template-63173]Block Breaker Template[/url]", developed by Daniel Buckley.
The game was abandoned roughly after launch and hasn't been updated in 1 month. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed.
The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The amateur pixelcrap visual presentation here at best could have been an attempt to use "retro" as a crutch, a weak excuse to avoid admitting the developer wasn't capable of doing the job of a game developer this decade and creating cutting edge, high quality 3D visuals. While a lack of skill or funding is the explanation for this failure, it's no excuse. The end result of this incompetence is a game that looks dramatically inferior to professionally developed games. Terraria and Undertale succeeded [i]despite[/i] looking crap, not [i]because[/i] they look crap.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content.
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?
Girl And Demon 1 has the preposterous price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Borderlands 2", "Dragon Age: Origins" or "Outlast". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. No pixelcrap is worth $5. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
Ethics aside, there's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's not worth recommending to gamers, but the unethical nature of the developer/their associates makes it completely impossible.
