Questr

Really simple game whose complexity, price, and mechanics ought to align with a mobile platform rather than being put on pc. Horrifically overpriced. Shouldn't be selling for more than $0.99. Play Reigns instead, which is priced appropriately and better fleshed out. First game I am ever requesting a refund on.

[h1]Introduction[/h1] Can too much randomness, hurt a video game? It’s obviously the mark of distinction for many titles on Steam and until Questr, I could have sworn that the unpredictable, open-ended scenarios can never be considered excessive or chaotic to the point of incoherence. Well, this has been an eye-opening experience. As the Steam debut for Mutant Entertainment Studios, this developer seems to focus on the unconventional topics out there. Their second project was “I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling”, a satirical game aimed at the lootbox frenzy of recent years. That one shall receive a review from yours truly as well, but for now let’s focus on the task at hand. [h1]Story[/h1] While I can’t really write about an elaborate storyline, the fragments you can piece together, begin to take shape quite nicely. You may regard Questr as a frame story which can offer both pleasant and unpleasant surprises. Consider yourself the Dungeon Master within a Dungeons & Dragons setting, but instead of having to deal with the logistics and environment, you simply focus on a party of would-be heroes. More likely a ragtag group of dim-witted adventurers and cartoonishly evil mercenaries which can be hired from the local watering hole. Yeah, the classic RPG tavern which in our case, is represented by an interface which resembles Tinder for some reason. Perhaps it’s yet another attempt at humor. You better think twice before you swipe right though. STDs and regrets are the least of your worries in Questr. The quests which would form the narrative of this title, are tongue-in-cheek alternatives to the established fairy tales they inspire themselves from, to a certain extent. Bitter-sweet conclusions with an obvious emphasis on bitter. Less Shrek and more attuned to Grimm (a black humor video game found on Steam as well). I didn’t have an issue with the story as much as I did with its “protagonists”. They are as reliable as asking Windows Network Diagnostics for help when you lost the internet connection, to put futility into perspective. Stating the obvious isn’t very helpful, right? Questr mixes the “marvelous” personalities of your hired crew with equally random situations that are met within a quest of choice. The less you expect things to go smoothly, the more likely you are to enjoy this game. Success will literally depend on a Wheel of (mis)Fortune. [h1]Graphics[/h1] Unity Engine. Not sure I should’ve expected something else, but at least I had no technical issues and the performance never strayed off the “beaten path” for this graphics engine. It’s almost entirely a 2D affair, with the occasional 3D character being rendered in a simplistic manner. Or the large pixel filter, if you feeling particularly creative. It’s looking decent given its weird mix of subgenres. RPG Tinder is just as visually enticing as its real life counterpart. Make of that what you will, since beauty will always lie in the eyes of the beholder. [h1]Audio[/h1] Questr has an instrumental soundtrack. End of story. What, you were expecting some voice acting? I was, yet there’s none to be found. It’s a pity for certain, as the humorous interactions between clearly incompatible individuals thrown in the midst of situations even more ludicrous than themselves, would have been quite the redeeming point. A missed opportunity at recreating the Theatre of the Absurd, in video gaming format. Better luck next time, Mutant Entertainment Studios. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] A text-based adventure this is not. At least, I don’t think it fits that conventional description. It can’t really be a visual novel either, since the characters are randomly generated. Only points of stability are the quests themselves. The steps taken towards advancing the quest progress, are less predictable though. Allow me to explain. The faux-fairly tale missions, resemble a map dotted by points of interest drawn in a linear manner. A path which doesn’t leave much room for interpretation at first glance. But it does, since the “side quests” required before mission success are just as randomly generated as the party members you have to select and pay without delay. Questr has a refreshingly cruel economy, if I can say so myself. You can fail the quests by going bankrupt, far more often than running out of “candidates”. Mercs and certain ladies of ill repute, do have this tendency of asking for cash upfront. Whether you’ll be enjoying the outcome or not, is of no concern to the service providers in both cases. So, just plan accordingly and still be prepared to take a considerable loss to your in-game coin purse. You’re unlikely to fill a treasure chest with the earnings from each successful side quest as it is. I was barely breaking even without employing a full roster of “heroes”. Which takes us to the bread and butter within this title. NPC interaction is the delight of Questr. Like a very insistent personality test, the crew’s resolve shall be constantly under fire from all sorts of factors. The Morale Meter ultimately influences the odds of quest success and even survival for a selected few individuals. I noticed that the adventurers belong to certain noble houses that despire each other and shout their factional motto at every occasion they get. This isn’t even the only less-than-subtle attempt of mocking Game of Thrones. Get used to party members betraying you and running off not only with their wage but also part of the bounty. Hunting them down can become repetitive very fast. No element of surprise when it’s near mathematical certainty that at least one of the dirtbags you hired, intends to stab you in the back as soon as he’ll spot such an opportunity. If this was meant to be a lesson about not trusting strangers, it hits the target by bullseye. Since this is an RPG though, how about we role play as being in charge of a party that might contain actually likeable characters? I hope I’m not asking for too much. One last argument to strengthen my distaste for the chaotic randomness in Questr, is represented by the option to have a “friend” in the party. A crew member that requires no payment at all and who trust you. Isn’t that great? No, once you are forced to bribe him into staying in the friends section, unless he leaves the party. With friends like these, who needs enemies? [h1]Verdict[/h1] If it didn’t remotely amuse me, I would have dropped Questr’s rating even further and thus, stop recommending it. In its current state, I’d say that it might belong to the Early Access label, even if it is not marketed so. It feels unfinished and it proves to me that replay value through unpredictability, only works on paper. In practice, video games need to cling onto at least a handful of ideas which should never be subjected to randomly generated elements. Questr may be mildly entertaining if you’re accustomed to the many tropes belonging to the fantasy genre. As long as you’re not taking it seriously, perhaps you may even learn to enjoy such a title. [h1]Strong Points[/h1] + Almost abstract. + Steam Achievements. + Humorous & replay values. [h1]Weak Points[/h1] - Interesting concept, weird execution. - Limited selection of sounds. - No Steam Trading Cards. - Far too random. [b]Rating 60/100[/b] [quote]This review was submitted for [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/_YoloArmy]Yolo Army[/url], through the generous contribution of [url=http://steamcommunity.com/id/mofoswaginess]Mofoswaginess[/url] and the Steam Curator Connect program.[/quote]

This is a very interesting game and as a concept I love Questr. Unfortunately I really dislike how it plays out as a game, for the time being. My biggest problem with it is that it feels way too luck driven. In the game you create a party to go on an adventure using a Tinder-like system; you see a quick blurb about a potential party member then you swipe left or right to add them to your party reject them. In order to complete an adventure you must create a party that can work well together by having compatible classes, likes/dislikes, and alignments. However, some people lie, in some cases lie about everything about themselves, and from what I can tell there is no real tell if someone is a liar before it is reveled. If there is, I wasn't able to figure it out in about two hours of gameplace and the fact that there's no help screens or tooltips may make it so that I'm just missing something. Also, once a liar is found out you are stuck with them. There's no way, as far as I figured out, to eject them from the party once revealed. If a person you took on reveals that he hates everything about everyone in your party you are left helpless as you watch morale plummet because of that one liar in your midst and, at the end of the adventure, the party's current morale plays a key role in determining if your party is success chance. Add to this some technical problems as well; the game crashed a few times on me, including twice when I was trying to record it for my video (link below) and the fact that it keeps resetting its volume settings on start up just adds to my aggravation with the game. Plus, the game is a bit on the expensive side for what it is at the end of the day. I do hope that Questr improves during the early access process but right now I have no choice but the swipe left. Version Played: Beta Build 0.7 [url=https://youtu.be/JccE8b4OxA8] My full first impressions video[/url]

[h1] What Is Questr? [/h1] Best described as a mashup between Tindr (the dating app) and Dungeons and Dragons (the RPG). You'll form a party of unusual and eclectic characters by swiping them left or right, accepting them by swiping right or ignoring them with left. These characters all carry their own statistics, likes, and dislikes. It's this combination of effects that makes it imperative that you choose your fellow adventurers wisely. Maybe that Drow elf has a dislike for frat boys and won't work well with your Party Bard. Or perhaps the Bard dislikes Gnomes, and so you should avoid swiping right on any of the short folk. You'll take these heroes and go on adventures, overcoming obstacles and snatching treasure up. A series of adventures leads you from a small village where you start, to a climatic confrontation with some dark evil. It's basically D&D with a cute skin. [h1] What Should I Know? [/h1] The game itself has a lot of content, but mechanically it's not too varied. You're basically looking to matchup heroes as closely as you can, spend your upgrades to ensure they work together and read their responses to guess who would be the best to overcome a challenge. As an example, I had come across some Orcs. Each of the heroes has a statement about Orcs, giving you hints at how to complete the challenge. My party Bard wanted to party with the orcs ("These bros throw the best parties, break out the kegs!") and I selected him to attempt the challenge. They partied and we succeeded! Because of the random combination of elements that goes into creating characters, foes, and events, I can see a lot of possibility for future expansion so any repetition that bothered me across my time playing has obvious points the developers can inflate the game at to remove these repeating patterns. [h1] Final Thoughts [/h1] The game has a unique art style, serviceable sound, and solid gameplay mechanics. But each of these things falls flat when it comes to repetition. The art they have is great, but you end up seeing the same portraits over and over. The sound works, but there isn't enough of it for variety. The gameplay is fun, but you'll come across the same match-ups and foes over and over. In short, for 5 bucks you'll get more than an hour or so out of it. Maybe you'll like it enough to keep playing or maybe you'll dislike it. But it'll be worth the money, if you were to compare it to watching a movie or buying an album.

This game is addicting and funny as hell! Look out for betrayals, they are the worst!!! I want to compete every quest, like I said....addicting!

A nice concept, but executed poorly. New players are bombarded with complexity and an abrupt interface with only the most basic hand-holding. The gameplay loop becomes apparent with some experimentation, but Questr is slow to inspire player empowerment over its own mechanics, some of which only serving to clutter the core experience. More development time would go a long way toward making Questr enjoyable.

Questr is basically an asset flip, the game assets are all derived from Synty's Polygon packs, but the developer decided that, instead of crediting Synty for the assets, he's put his own name on them and is trying to claim credit for Synty's work. Taking the work of others and not crediting them is unethical, it's plagiarism. Try doing that on an academic paper and see how fast you get kicked out of college. Anyway, this is a really badly done RNG cardgame thing with a fantasy theme (hence the Synty fantasy poly packs that make up most of the visual assets). The gimmick is that it's like a mobile dating app and you swipe left or right to decide which warriors go in your party... yeah that's it, that's the gimmick. Was that worth stealing credit for Synty assets and polluting Steam with more unethical asset flips for? Nope. Putting aside the blatant plagiarism here, even if the developer didn't steal someone else's assets, the game would still be terrible. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does. The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers. This is indistinguishable from a mobile app, but they put this on Steam instead of the app stores by mistake. Was it 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 Questr 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. 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 all-time peak player number was only 8 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. The game contains stock/store assets and other packages, but the "developer" here hasn't credited the people who actually did the work for the game. While this isn't necessarily against the license for the use of those assets, claiming the work of others as your own is unethical. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Questr is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.

[h1] Assetus flipus pospolitus. [/h1]

Party was a Drow Bro, and a Drunk Friar. Failed at pretty much everything. 10/10 would swipe right again.

Questr is like a dating app but for adventure, swipe right on your team, hope they like you and go questing together for fame, glory, money, and crystals for more quests, fame, glory, and money.