"Kiya" is not a game. Games contain meaningful gamelike interaction and game loops, which are absent in this "art experience".
Instead of being a game, "Kiya" is a software application that presents a misplaced, tone deaf, horrific and sad VR tech demo from Al Jazeera, intended to be a confrontational Youtube video about violence towards women as it recounts the events of an horrific real world crime, but in VR, and published on Steam as if it was a GAME.
Talk about tone deaf disrespect to the memory of a victim and the family.
This is Steam, for games. Not Youtube machinima documentaries about crime and social issues. FFS.
Trying to address serious issues such as crime, mental and emotional health through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good.
The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of crime and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful.
It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to address social issues. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers.
People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games (or in this case badly made Youtube videos) attempting to get attention/fame by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.
I've said it already but I can't get over how utterly tone deaf this is.
There was a video section on Steam, but it's deprecated and basically closed, so failed filmmakers seem to just try to abuse the Steam games section instead. Why is this good for gamers? It's not.
For those unfamiliar with what actually makes something a game, a "game loop" describes the interaction and feedback a gamer has when playing a game.
Tetris, for example, has a game loop where a random block appears, the gamer interacts with the block to position it, and then the game decides if that finishes a row or not, increases the players score if any rows were completed, then gives the gamer another block to position. Counter-Strike has a game loop where a player seeks another player, tests their skill against that player by shooting them or being shot, the computer rewards the player if they win, and then if the player survives, they repeat that loop.
There's no loop here, no true interactive feedback. It simply is not a game, it cannot be "played".
This has misleadingly been launched in the "Games" section of Steam instead of the "Software" section. This is a common mistake for developers who are new to Steam, or don't understand the difference between games and software which isn't a game. It seems this software published incorrectly as a game is simply lack of experience/knowledge of the correct process.
Here's a link for the process to publish non-game software/non-game "art experiences" on Steam:
[url=https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithPublishing?issueid=925]Steam Developer Help With Software Publishing[/url]
It's unfortunate this process was not known about/followed, resulting in a non-game "art experience"/Youtube video being published in the wrong place.
Publishing Youtube videos on Steam in the Games section as games is misleading to gamers and somewhat harmful, because it pollutes the Steam marketplace and takes away visibility and market exposure for genuine game developers who do the right thing and make games for gamers.
There are no gameplay loops in this rejected film school dropout exhibition, no "gameplay", no meaningful game like interaction. As such, this has no merit as a video game for gamers, and so I cannot recommend this non-game as a game to gamers.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 7 concurrent viewers[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. But we should expect this when things which are not games get published as if they are.
