"Midnight at Forest" is a very badly made first person horror/jumpscare adventure with a few fake day 1 reviews and a bunch of "borrowed" Unity assets, and nothing else at all going for it. At least they're not trying to scam people into paying money for this.
This features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's clear the developers behind this didn't understand that.
This is "free" enough, at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer seems to have decided to ignore Valve guidelines for developers just to reiterate the price of this asset flip... which is blatantly obvious already and, something I happen to also have mentioned in my review.
A review that I guess the developer didn't read at all. Because I also explain why just because something is free doesn't mean it's valuable. Gamers have a right to be presented with honest and factual reviews of all products, good or bad... or asset flipped. And the fake reviews on this game are something gamers should be warned about, too.
Review manipulation of the sort the developer seems to have engaged in here is the kind of thing that gets games removed from Steam and developers banned. It's absolutely wrong to mislead gamers with fake reviews, whether they're paid for or just sockpuppet "family and friends" reviews.
This is the kind of reason why some indie devs have such a bad name, and why the majority of gamers ignore their products. And ignore this they did... SteamDB doesn't lie, this asset flip only ever had three concurrent players, and that only happened once.
This kind of low effort asset flipping isn't harmless, either, it pollutes the Steam store and takes away valuable visibility and opportunity for exposure to genuine indie devs who do the right thing and don't dump a bunch of Unity assets on Steam in an attempt to get famous/impress their imaginary girlfriend.
It also makes it harder for gamers to find those genuinely made products.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
