Resonance

Resonance is a "free" student project that's been published on Steam as if it was a real game, to make the students feel a bit better about failing the course. Because if this first person adventure game was intended to be a serious, real game for PC gamers, it would be considered a true disaster. It's an obtuse and badly made "you're on a space station, work out what happened" adventure game. Little effort was made in instructing the students on basic game design principles such as, you know, sensible user interface design, or, you know, making the game work properly on the platform they're releasing it on. There's no English translation for the game, but that's ok. It turns out, the language of bad games is universal. 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. 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. 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 5 players (possibly the students themselves). 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. This is a really bad sign considering the price point. The game is completely free, as it's a non-professionally developed student project. It's difficult to say it's appropriate for colleges and schools to publish every bit of work their students produce (whether the students pass the course or not), because this is of questionable value for the most important people in the gaming industry - the gamers. Regardless in many ways, even if this is a student project, it's better than much of the pollution on Steam (asset flips and other shovelware/cash grabs). Unfortunately because this is a student project, and not a professionally developed game intended for gamers, and because of the defects outlined above, it's impossible to recommend this.