Jivana

"Jivana" is a student project self-published on Steam Direct. It's from Rubika Supinfogame in France. Student projects might look better than amateur shovelware, but they aren't real games. This is just a glorified homework assignment. It lacks the depth and value you get from professionally developed product because it was made for a grade, not for players. Schools, colleges and universities shouldn't be using Steam to show off student projects. It might be fine for the school's marketing, but it clutters the Steam store with pollution... we have to sort past all these short student tech demos just so we can find real, full games from professional developers. This is a case of a game dev college putting its own interests before the interests of gamers. The students made what looks like an amazing parkour puzzle platformer where you use elemental magic to create platforms and so on... really one of those cases where if this was a real game, it would be a smash hit. Instead, we have an unfinished student project. It's short. It's abandoned... the students got their grades and they just walked away. And that means it's a bug riddled, unoptimized, janky mess that's frustrating to play... many of the bugs are game breaking. The graphics in this game are really quite good, which at least makes the game look more appealing. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. Next is pricing and what value this has for gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free, that was a dismal public reception. But if you take into account the problems I bring up in this review, it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. This isn't a complete game for gamers, just a glorified homework assignment, and there's no profile benefits like a +1 count to your game collector badge, so I can't recommend adding it to your library.