Grayscale Memories is barely a game, it's more an art exhibition that's been dumped on Steam, presumably because the local art galleries took out a restraining order on the "artists" who had no other choice but to pay Valve $100 to dump this on Steam.
This is a collection of very simple minigames (probably made from horsing around with the deprecated "Fungus" construction kit addon for Unity) wrapped in a pretentious and annoying "THIS IS ART BECAUSE WE SAID SO THEREFORE THIS IS GOOD" wrapper, that, well, is really badly done. No wonder these guys couldn't make it in an art gallery.
And that's not to say games can't be art, of course they can, but art is a product of exquisite craftsmanship meeting highly talented vision... which this has neither of. To put it another way, if the Mona Lisa was a stick figure scribbled in crayon, she wouldn't be hanging in the Louvre. This game is the game design equivalent of a stick figure scribbled in crayon.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it.
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.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
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 only 4 players. 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 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 game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Grayscale Memories has the ridiculous, laughable price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]
The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer has the arrogance to DEMAND that paying customers must NEVER compare two games that are released on the same platform if one of those games wasn't made properly and the other was. I've never been so insulted by such anti-consumer sentiment from such a developer of trashware products.
The developer uses a completely faulty "food" analogy, that street food must NEVER be compared to fine dining. Then why in hell has this "chef" dragged a dead rat in a bun into a Michelin star restaurant? Why are they selling their barely recognisable "food" in a restaurant designed for edible food?
And it's laughable that the developer, in their utter arrogance and hubris, thinks if this was food it would be the equivalent of "street food"... absolutely wrong. "Street food" would be games like CS:2, cheap or free but still satisfying. If this crapheap amateur garbage "game" was food, the health department would have shut down the restaurant and imprisoned the kitchen staff for even thinking this would be acceptable to feed to people.
FACT: You can buy "fine dining" AAA games for the same price as this amateur train wreck. The developers terrible analogy just doesn't work.
So what is this really all about? Oh, of course. The developer breached Valve guidelines just to argue with a paying customer, because he wants you to know that HE is THE MAIN CHARACTER. Gamers, customers, just don't matter. And now we can see, when developers decide they are superstars, and put themselves before gamers without even considering whether they're remotely capable of doing the job (remember, this developer is so incompetent they could never get a job as a professional developer, but DEMANDS they are allowed to stand on the same podium as real, professional developers who work 7 day/week crunches to deliver quality, professional games to gamers), then garbage like Grayscale Memories is the result... nothing with any value whatsoever to gamers.
What arrogance.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
