Phucker in the Gulag

Ph*cker in the Gulag is a joke game that's been dumped on Steam for the amusement of nobody but the developers. It's mostly a GameMaker Studio based visual novel full of in-jokes for the developer and their friend (I doubt they have more than one considering just how bad this is). 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. Problematically, the user interface for this game is just a 2D text heavy panel with a few static images... it might as well be a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is often used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The game is free, which means this isn't some kind of cash grab or a scam, but the quality is so deplorably low this is just polluting the Steam store, which in itself is harmful. This pollution is taking up visiblity and marketing space from games that were developed by sincere developrs who did the right thing, and it makes it harder for those games to find an audience. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuine games, too. It's impossible to recommend this to gamers, and we can only hope Valve will implement some quality control at some point, instead of relying on reviews like mine to warn gamers away from pollution like this. One final note: Because this is more of a "joke" game, intended to draw attention from controversy or in the hopes of going viral because it's "so bad it's good" (but it isn't good at all), there's nothing here to offer to serious gamers. As usual, with most awful/joke games, all the comedians come out of the woodwork. The vast majority of the reviews for this game are joke reviews, such as "this game cured my cancer, saved my marriage, changed my life" etc. Because most of the reviews are as insincere as the game itself is, the positive review score for this game should be disregarded.