"Riddle of the Mask" is a basic Nonogram game... for those who never played one, it's a kind of grid-deduction-puzzle game, not unlike Minecraft or Sudoku. You're given a grid and a number of numerical clues. You must deduce where the safe places to click are. In a Nonogram, the correct clicks will reveal a small, obviously low resolution image or pattern. Yay, what fun. This is why top of the line gaming PCs costs thousands of dollars, right?
The developer, Creobit, has copy + pasted this game an insane FOURTY ONE TIMES... why cash in on one asset if you can cash in on multiple copies of the same game? Asset flipping begins at home!
Here's a list of the asset flips of this game that the Russian "developer" is polluting Steam with:
[list]
[*] Asian Riddles 1, 2, 3 + 4
[*] Christmas Griddlers
[*] Christmas Griddlers Journey to Santa
[*] Detective Riddles - Sherlock's Heritage 1 + 2
[*] Easter Riddles
[*] Egypt Picross Pharaohs Riddles
[*] Fill And Cross Christmas Riddles
[*] Fill and Cross Magic Journey
[*] Fill and Cross Pirate Riddles 1, 2 + 3
[*] Fill and Cross Royal Riddles
[*] Fill and Cross Trick or Treat 1, 2 + 3
[*] Fill and Cross World Contest
[*] Griddlers Beach Season
[*] Griddlers Legend Of The Pirates
[*] Griddlers TED and PET 1 + 2 (this game)
[*] Griddlers Victorian Picnic
[*] Halloween Patchwork Trick or Treat
[*] Halloween Riddles Mysterious Griddlers
[*] Magic Griddlers 1 + 2
[*] Olympus Griddlers
[*] Picross Beach Paradise
[*] Picross Bonbon - Nonogram
[*] Picross Fairytale - nonogram: Red Riding Hood secret
[*] Picross Fairytale: Legend of the Mermaid
[*] Picross Hansel and Gretel - Nonograms
[*] Riddle of the mask
[*] Royal Riddles
[*] Santa's Toy Factory Nonograms
[*] Thanksgiving Day Griddlers
[*] Valentine's Day Griddlers 1 + 2
[/list]
[i][b]These are all reskins of exactly the same game![/b][/i]
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.
The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio (with crappy "wings" to pad out the space). It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was 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 this 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 and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
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 3 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
"Riddle of the Mask" has the gamer gouging price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
