OctoQuest

Даже в 1980-ые сделали бы игру лучше...

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Octoquest is an Adobe Shockwave Flash/AIR 2D retro pixel platformer/adventure/RPG hybrid where you collect seeds and things and use mushrooms to power up. If the technical implementation were even 1% as imaginative as the game concept this might even be worth playing. Gameplay consists of basic platforming and other 2D retro game styles, mostly ripped off from other games such as Super Mario Bros, but nowhere near as good. Clever ideas can't hold up a game on their own. The technical implementation here has to be one of the worst I've seen in a good long time. Laughably, they released this game on Steam even though it's Flash game, I'm not sure what was going through their heads. Turns out Flash might have seemed neat for making little browser games in the 1990's, but it's 2022 now... this kind of thing isn't okay anymore. The crap game engine really does shine here... not only is resolution locked, but the game only runs windowed, no fullscreen... and here's the true comedy, if you resize the window it dynamically scales the aspect ratio! So you can have yourself a thin little octopus or a flat little octopus, that's how bad this really is. But however you choose to distort the aspect ratio just because the developers couldn't get that basic thing done right, it still looks bad. I think it's great they didn't resort to flipping stock assets here, but this leads to a quandry... flipped assets are almost always bad, because they're a clear sign the developers don't have the basic, required game design skills to create decent in-game assets. But what happens if a developer lacks the basic, required game design skills to create decent in-game assets, but tries anyway? Yep, you guessed it... you get garbage game assets. You get a few control tweaks but you can't just directly edit keybindings. Another fault, perhaps, of the Adobe AIR/Flash engine behind the game. Regardless of the cause, this is another factor that may deter many gamers. So we have a three way tie for the worst things about this game... the game implementation itself, the use of Adobe Flash/AIR like it's the 1990's and that's apparently still okay (even then it wasn't so great), and the terrible visuals. Still, despite this being an objectively terrible game from almost every perspective, the ideas were good, and this is perhaps just a case where amateur developers wasted their time on amateur projects when they could be really contributing to the gaming industry in a professional occupation where they can work with other game developers to shore up their numerous weak points. And get paid for their efforts. Hopefully the developers here can go on to bigger and better things.