"Morendo" is a garbage game jam tech demo, not to be confused with a real game. This is a short and badly made, rushed out Flash tier point and click adventure, more cringe e-book than game.
The idea is that you follow a poorly written noir e-book about a guitarist (not an interesting one) who gets drunk and has sex. That's a lot of imagination from the developers there.
So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem.
There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time.
We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle.
The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 10 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download.
This is the product of a game jam, which immediately tells us it isn't a sincere piece of software. Real games take years of professional work, not a single weekend of amateur hacking. You cannot expect a product slapped together in a week or less to have any value, and "Morendo" shows that these rushed game jam entries are just shovelware impersonating a real game. Badly.
Also, products created in game jams were never intended for gamers. They exist only to stroke the ego of amateur developers who can't get a real job in the industry. When untalented developers put their own vanity before the needs of the player, garbage like "Morendo" is the result.
Imagine if airports ran a "plane jam" to see who which amateur enthusiast could build an airplane within a weekend with a $100 budget. Would you fly on that plane? No. It takes time and resources to do a job properly.It might seem harmless for hundreds, if not thousands of these game-jam ego projects being dumped on Steam, but it's not. They take away marketing space that should properly be available to genuine developers who did the right thing and spent years making real, serious games for gamers. They make it harder for gamers to find those games... they pollute Steam with garbage people have to push aside when looking for genuinely made games. They give amateur developers and even worse name. All of this is bad for the industry, and bad for us gamers.
The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), 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, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 6 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Not on a bet. I didn't have to pay for this, but I still feel ripped off.
