"Myth Bearer" is an attempt to make an old school 8 bit RPG like Ultima/Questron/Legacy of the Ancients only with slightly worse graphics and published in 2020, aligned to compete with games like Baldur's Gate 3. Needless to say this failed to compete despite the lower price point, because the quality and depth are nowhere near the same. And of course gamers who wanted a retro experience would just fire up those old games like Ultima, because they already exist and didn't stop existing, so a somewhat deficient clone wasn't something gamers desperately needed.
What do you do in the game? Well it's good some rather comfortable old school RPG stuff, hit points and attributes and magic items to find and equip, dungeons to wander around, and monsters to compare your hitpoints against, we all know the deal. Only just a bit shallower and not as good as the old games it's aping.
This game fails on the visuals because of the use of incredibly lazy, ugly pixelcrap. The developer would probably argue this is a "deliberate artistic choice" but we all know it's because the developer was incapable of producing anything better. The game looks very poor compared to professionally developed games. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant; the choice detracts from the game. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's a disservice to gamers when developers don't bother doing their jobs and creating contemporary, high quality visuals. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are rare exceptions that succeeded [i]in spite[/i] of their awful graphics. Pixelcrap is never really okay, and there's no excuse for games that look this bad.
This game is fairly dated at 6 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
This was made with the godawful "GameMaker Studio" construction kit/toolset, which is popular amongst amateur developers because it handholds you through making really crap 2D games that you can publish for $100 on Steam Direct. This lets you pat yourself on the back for pretending to be a real game developer, which explains why GameMaker Studio is responsible for so much ignored garbage on Steam.
GameMaker Studio has never really been used to make a truly successful game, but that doesn't stop people from trying and failing. It's a particularly bad game engine that can only be used for making low quality 2D products. Like this. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old saying goes. Another reason this particular game wasn't successful.
Next is pricing and what value this has for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $3 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
A peak of [b]10 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
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.
Finally, I'm here to help save gamers time by filtering out the noise and substandard games. If you don't agree with my assessment of the defects in this game, go ahead and download it... maybe you'll find the same defects to be as unacceptable as I did, maybe not. Even write your own review. Positive or negative, game reviews are here to help other gamers by informing their decisions on what to spend their time on.
