Sacrificial Lighthouse is a very simple (and unfortunately broken, at least for me) 2D side scrolling mobile-app tier point and click adventure game/walking sim. You guide a hand drawn/pastel/chalk drawn character through a gloomy environment (I guess).
Two key problems, before we get into the weeds of the technical aspects of this game; First, it's janky, as I was walking around, it stuttered a lot and I would just stop for no reason and would have to re-press the movement key to start moving again.
Also, and this is a game breaker, you're apparently supposed to interact with stuff by putting your finger on your iPhone screen (or click with the mouse) but that didn't work for me... which rendered the game unplayable. So that's no good.
Despite not being in Steam Early Access (where this arguably belongs), the game is missing features and is apparently incomplete. Due to the lack of meaningful progress from the developer, it's unlikely the game will be completed at all, yet the developers reprehensively have their hand out for money for an incomplete game. The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The artwork here isn't great, the simplistic style pastel/crayon drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
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 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. And, as mentioned, it's broken.
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 Sacrificial Lighthouse 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 6 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.
This game features a number of suspicious, likely fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and all have very similar wording and writing style, most in Russian. Immediately after this huge peak of reviews, reviews (and player counts) for the game dropped incredibly sharply. This is highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor player counts. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt. This might have been done to deceive/mislead gamers into paying for a bad product.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Sacrificial Lighthouse has the utterly unrealistic price of around $6 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. For comparison, the $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "Far Cry 3", "Portal 2" or "Shadow Warrior". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
