"Hermit Home Designer" is more of a book than a game. The idea is that you interact with a "Hikikomori", which is the Japanese word to describe someone who becomes severely socially withdrawn, lives at home and never leaves their house or seeks out interaction with others. Which is a serious problem in Japan, and other parts of the world too, and is linked to depression and other health problems. Anyway. This one tries to be a little more light hearted about it, and gives yuou the opportunity to decorate the home.
What do you do in the game? Well, that's really the problem and a leading cause of this failing... reading pages and pages of somewhat cringey e-book writing isn't a game... and really, neither is dragging and dropping stuff around a home to make it look tidier. Not games. Software, maybe, but there's no game loop.
Here's another case where Itch failed. They have like, ONE job... to act as containment to prevent poorly made amateur shovelware from leaking out onto platforms where gamers might see them and lose hope in the gaming industry. But here we are. The participation trophies and hi-5's from the group hug weren't enough and some of the amateur drivel they're supposed to protect us from got out.
It's difficult to call this a game, because of all the endless, badly written e-book/visual novel fanfiction text, which takes prime position in front of gameplay or anything PC gamers look for in a PC game. The "author" fails to grasp the important game design axiom, "Show, don't tell". You just get stuck reading walls of mediocre text, where they should have related the story through the mechanics of the game. My gaming PC is not an e-reader. We don't come to a shop for PC games looking for badly written fan-fictions.
The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers.
Most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's usually some kind of monetisation, from nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, to any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 4 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
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? What's the verdict?
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.
