Project Tarvotan is a somewhat unusual kind of game, I suppose it's best explained as a kind of stat based "survival" game meets space exploration/trading game. There's a welcome depth to the game mechanics as you scan planets, dispatch probes, trade and ally with various factions and so on. But where it falls down is in a series of very poor game design decisions. Most of the game interface is just clicking through various menus and things like an interactive web game. There's golf-swing minigames and so on as well, which clash with the whole idea of piloting a spaceship and exploring the galaxy... thematically these elements just don't sit properly together.
One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately ethical behaviour and genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant gaming experience.
The first thing that will strike anyone seriously trying to play this is just how clunky, confronting and obtuse the user interface is. Standard UI conventions aren't followed, and because the majority of the "gameplay" here is conducted by clicking through menus, not getting those perfect is a death knell for this kind of game.
The game doesn't have any save game features, despite that being a basic standard for all games of this time. The developer might defend this as an attempt to make the game seem more "difficult" without them having to balance the game or do their job properly with engaging and challenging level design, but it's just as likely they simply couldn't work out how to make a save game feature work. Either way, that's a defect that adds another reason for gamers to avoid this game.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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 features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. The planet Earth almost looks like a D20. I feel bad for anyone who has to fly around on that planet, avoiding all the hard edges. 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 bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Project Tarvotan is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
