Pepper's Castle

RPG Maker strikes again! This is yet another RPG Maker asset flip, a low effort kitbash made with the Final Fantasy ripoff construction kit, RPG Maker, in their own words, "These easy to use tools are simple enough for a child". This is just a cringey high school anime club dropout fan-fiction combined with extremely poor quality retro game assets. This godawful RPG Maker asset flip features bespoke art and a cringey elementary school tier plot where you choose to be a good guy or a bad guy, with a focus on the usual badly done Final Fantasy ripoff JRPG turn based combat that was pretty poor compared to CRPGs at the time when Final Fantasy was released decades ago, and is even more crap now. Like other RPG Maker "games", the game engine is extremely low quality. It displays badly in fullscreen, and has no real graphics settings or HD support. It's not up to the same standard we expect from a modern PC game. We can make the argument that construction kit toys like RPG Maker are intended for making small games and demos and things to pass around with friends. They shouldn't be used as a substitute or "Ez-mode" to allow unqualified amateurs to LARP that they're real, actual game developers. Like most RPG Maker shovelware, the game uses low quality 2D "retro" pixelcrap art and has bad gameplay. RPG Maker is garbage and never results in products with any real value as PC games. There are some original game assets here, and you can tell because they look worse than the garbage canned/stock RPG Maker assets that usually get flipped into these kitbashes. PC gamers expect and deserve quality, high fidelity, immersive 3D visuals, not this lazy crapware. In terms of visuals, this features really godawful MS-Paint tier "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. The deplorably bad visuals here come across as an insult to gamers. Now onto pricing and value. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 2 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this. Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? Definitely not. This isn't worth it. I'm paraphrasing another reviewer here, but this should be a paid product... they'd have to pay people to download it.