Happy Home: Prologue

"Happy Home: Prologue" is is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Happy Home". Happy Home is abandoned as a game concept and will never be made. It was intended to be more-book-than-game (so not really a good fit for the PC gaming enthusiasts here on Steam), a simple haunted house exploration text adventure, but given nobody even wanted this "free" advertisement for the product, it's easy to see why the developers gave up. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Happy Home, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Happy Home: Prologue" too. Usually the purpose of these advertisements is to get you to shell out money to the developer to buy the full product, but the developer hasn't bothered actually making a product you can buy, leaving this as an advertisement for nothing. We must question what value this pointless advertising has for gamers... and the answer is "none". Due to the poor public response amongst gamers for this advertisement, it seems unlikely the developer will go on to make the full product. 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. As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the advert peaked at only 2 concurrent users... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.