Lockheart Indigo

RPG Maker strikes again! Lockheart Indigo is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. This is another case where the developer couldn't work out how to create a JRPG with RPG Maker (the only thing it can do, and it's terrible at it). Instead we get some kind of garbage 2D retro pixel "film noir" adventure game about a private eye... you know what two things never, ever go together? Yeah, pixelcrap and film noir. And this game illustrates clearly why they should never be even mentioned in the same sentence, let alone appear together in a game. Or in this case, an RPG Maker kitbash. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $5 USD for this. I know this was supposed to be a dark and brooding "film noir" thing, but slapping comedy pricing on pixelcrap just to illicit laughs from gamers who see the sheer optimism is counterproductive. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 5 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. 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.