Le Voyage de Toki

Le Voyage de Toki is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. It's a simple, very routine and generic puzzle platformer that seems highly unpolished and rushed onto Steam as an attempted cash grab (the bizarre pricing strongly suggests this). Gameplay is uninspired, just jump around some kind of cavern or something. Who knows. There's no English translation for the game, but that's ok. It turns out, the language of bad games is universal. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play, especially when jumping, the physics are just wrong as you blast upwards then crash back down to earth with ridiculous velocity... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Le Voyage de Toki is massively, insultingly overpriced at $6 USD, and it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. [b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.