No men in this house

Хорошее продолжение первой части дилогии, намного короче, чем наверное всё-же не успевает надоесть и превратиться в монотонное повествование. Сюжет не плох, держит свою планку. Ждём что-нибудь ещё.

Жена сказала если на этом обзоре будет 50 лайков и 5 наград, она купит ящик пива, мужики выручайте! My wife said if this review gets 50 likes and 5 awards, she will buy a case of beer, guys help me out!

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Эх, в Тайланд захотелось теперь...

"No men in this house" is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This garbage e-book at least deviates from what's normal on non-game e-books dumped on Steam... it's not directly about the authors imaginary anime girlfriend. Instead it's a rather poorly written account of the experiences of Russian tourists in Thailand. But one thing remains constant... the writing of this fan-fiction is garbage tier. This was slapped together with the godawful Ren'Py visual novel construction kit... enabling terrible authors to publish books as if they were games when otherwise we might have been spared the pollution. So, just like no professional writing took place here, no professional software development took place, either. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 3 concurrent readers... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. The funny thing is, if you wanted to print this book, you'd only need to print 3 copies to satisfy the entire world's demand for it. While this E-book has no up-front cost, you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games. It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt. [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 first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are "The Main Character". You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet The Main Character, and nobody else matters. Case in point, they admit the writing here is utter garbage but they published it anyway, even knowing it's garbage nobody wanted. Why would anyone do this? Well, when the only person in the whole world who matters is you, screw everyone else. What a disgusting attitude. It's absolutely harmful to gamers and the gaming industry when incompetent authors publish garbage that isn't even a game into the games section on Steam. This is also harmful to genuine amateur developers because it's why amateur developers have such a bad name and their products are avoided by gamers. But the "author" of this garbage knows that... yet published it anyway, regardless of the harm it causes. Because he's "The Main Character" of the story of the entire universe. 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 garbage E-book to anyone.

Вторая игра от этого же автора оставляет положительные отзывы. Вроде простая, но сюжет очень интересный. Читая все заметки игра проходится за 5 часов. Есть отсылки на "Чок-чок зубы на крючок" (другая игра автора с специфическим названием).

Игра 'No men in this house' - это жуткое и атмосферное приключение в духе хорроров старой школы. Визуальный стиль, выполненный в VHS-эстетике, добавляет саспенса и ощущения дежавю, как будто смотришь забытый фильм ужасов. Сюжет, хоть и держится в секрете на протяжении большей части игры, постепенно раскрывается, подкидывая игроку жуткие намеки о происходящем в доме. Атмосфера безысходности и постоянного напряжения создается благодаря умелому использованию скримеров, зловещего звукового сопровождения и ощущения постоянного преследования. Геймплей довольно прост, но эффективен. Исследование дома, поиск предметов и решение простых головоломок - все это подчинено главной цели: выжить и разобраться в происходящем кошмаре. Игра short, но запоминающаяся, и, безусловно, стоит внимания для любителей инди-хорроров, ищущих новых источников страха. Единственный минус - небольшая продолжительность, хотелось бы больше погрузиться в этот жуткий мир. В целом, 'No men in this house' - это впечатляющий инди-хоррор, который мастерски создает атмосферу страха и напряжения, оставляя после себя долгое послевкусие.