Original

Lucky me has the dubious honour of writing the first review for the ironically named "Original", an entirely unoriginal mobile app like game. Original is a mobile app-like physics puzzle where you control some cartoony blob and you use a slingshot/physics/trajectory system to throw yourself around a small platformer like level. It's got some similarities with Angry Birds but you move your point of propulsion with you and you can propel yourself multiple times.. and there's no buildings or pigs to destroy. So it's a bit more shallow than Angry Birds, which you can play for free on the mobile app stores. If you were a mobile peasant, that is. The game 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 and at the time of this review the game is reaching the developers commitment to finish the game (2-3 months from launch, and we're 2 months in but the game does not look close to complete to any acceptable standard). 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. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes Original might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. 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 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Original has the gamer gouging price of around $4 USD (for what compares poorly to mobile apps), it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product. [b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b]Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.