Nomori: Prologue

Nomori: Prologue is not strictly a game. It's an advertisement for an unfinished Early Access game called Nomori. It's a common mistake when unfamiliar with Steam to launch demos/advertisements as full games on Steam instead of tagging them correctly as demos. Here's the instructions for putting a demo up on Steam, to demonstrate that there is a correct process for this, which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing advertisements and demos as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. The game that this is advertising is still being developed, but development is slow enough that the game appears to be headed to Development Hell. While there's still time before the game reaches the developers committed deadline to complete the game, it's only getting very small updates. There's no reliable indication the game will ever be completed, which is another reason for gamers to avoid this. It's important to remember that only about 25% of Early Access games ever get completed... the vast majority of Early Access games are abandoned and all money taken from gamers is never refunded. Early Access games are a huge risk and in general should be avoided. While this advertisement itself is free (but don't worry, the gaming industry is working very hard to find ways to make you pay them for adverts), it's not great. It's obviously incomplete (labeled as pre-Alpha, which really does make us question what value this has for gamers). It's a cartoony low poly third person 3D puzzle platformer (because, you know, Steam doesn't have any of those so clearly we need advertisements for incomplete ones). The game rips off Portal's game mechanics with a bit of time travel stuff thrown in... it's clear the developer has some vision but the technical execution is a hard fail. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game assets are far from bleeding edge, with lowish polygon counts and somewhat low resolution textures, making this look like it's at least 10 years old. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks poor in comparison to more professionally produced games as a result of their decisions. Because this is an advert for an unreleased Early Access game, it's hard to tell if there's any asset flipping going on. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 13 players (this is exceptionally low considering this advertisement is available for free). This is a remarkably low number, and now, 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. So, should you download this advertisement? Of course not. You can get ads on Youtube for free. It's a disservice to gamers when developers fail to follow simple guidelines and pollute Steam with advertising when there's a clear and present process available to them for publishing adverts and demos.