"Harrowed Ground" is more e-book than actual game, although there are some mini puzzles and stuff... it's still more correct to treat this like a book than a game. So we will. Refreshingly, this high school anime club dropout fan-fiction is not in fact all about the author and his imaginary girlfriend (it's sad but true, most e-books on Steam follow this narrative). Instead, we're in the ancient age of bronze and we're planning a heist. It feels like someone played too much Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and decided to make an e-book fan-fiction about it. And that's mostly why this was a complete and utter failure on Steam Direct.
What do you do in the game? Read the cringely bad writing, click through some mini-puzzles that make the puzzle section at the back of the newspaper look like GTA:V.
It seems this was abandoned by the devs 2 years and 2 months ago. It will stay incomplete forever. These unfinished, abandoned game attempts just clog the storefront and make it difficult for players to find honest, fully developed games.
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.
Because gaming is a visual medium it's always important to talk about the visual presentation that a game has. Unfortunately, this isn't a game, it's an E-book, the primary focus is text. And we know the text is badly written because if the would be "author" of this E-book could write to any decent standard, they'd be a published author with books on bookshelves. Instead, they've had to resort to paying $100 to dump their E-book onto Steam as if it was a game, when they know full well it isn't.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers.
So this is "free", but it's abandoned. Worse, it was never intended to be free. The developer intended to charge for this if it ever left Early Access... but the developer just couldn't be bothered. Making this abandoned pollution that gamers need to filter through when searching for products made by more ethical developers who fulfill their promise to deliver on their Early Access commitment instead of breaking that promise.
At the time of this review, SteamDB shows us the all-time peak of ONLY ONE player. That's right, just one. When I launched this, I personally equalled the highest peak player count, just by myself. How bad is that?? SteamDB shows people loading it up just to see how bad it is then deleting it maybe once or twice a month and that's it. Given the vast number of gamess on Steam (over 140,000 games!), it's understandable gamers ignored this... but this is an embarrassing failure in terms of public reception.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
