RPG Maker strikes again!
"Haeven" 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 coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.
This RPG Maker kitbash eschews the usual high school anime club dropout fan-fiction about the developers imaginary girlfriend for a high school art class dropout fan-fiction about some artistic garbage. It doesn't work.
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, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 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 here that the "art" isn't the usual stock RPG Maker pixelcrap Final Fantasy ripoff flipped assets, instead, the developer made their own, and they look worse. I think they were going for a South Park Season 1 vibe or something... either way, this is painful to look at. Developers need to try to understand that gaming is a visual medium.
This game is fairly dated at 9 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
[quote][b][url=https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-notices/16-cfr-part-465-trade-regulation-rule-use-consumer-reviews-testimonials-final-rule]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/b]
This product features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the product launched on Steam, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
Due to the 2024 FTC ruling, these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law ([i]16 CFR § 465.2, 15 U.S.C. § 45[/i])[/quote]
Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Nope. There's no up front cost here, but I still feel like I got ripped off, and I didn't even spend any money. That's how bad this is.
