"MouseLife - Parenthood" is an unusual game, a sort of life simulator adventure game where you control a 2D retro pixel mouse and you have to look after your child by doing various minigame type stuff by adventuring and stealthing around a 2D retro pixel home thing. Like the game Shelter but without any of the emotional attachment or production quality (such as it was).
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $2.50 USD for this. 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.
The poor quality of this game is also 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
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.
[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 claims this is their first time trying to make a game. If I went to a restaurant, got sick from eating bad food, and got told "The chef is new and has never cooked food before", would that make it okay? No, it wouldn't. The developer supplied a very valid reason why this should never have been put up for sale on Steam in the first place.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
The developer wants you to know they "learned a lot" by publishing garbage on Steam Direct where nobody wanted it. That really hammers home the point... this is Steam, for gamers, it's not for incompetent developers who have no idea what they are doing to dump garbage homework assignments onto Steam just to "learn" anything... developers should know what they're doing before [b]anything[/b] else. Polluting Steam with garbage from developers who now apparently admit they are unqualified and unfit to publish products they know aren't good enough for Steam hurts everyone, and it gives amateur developers an even worse name.
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.
