"Shiro" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not.
Now, while this is primarily a platformer it does feature a lightweight "shoot 'em up" feature as well. That's even worse than the platformer part, and is kinda pointless. The game modes are basic reskins/kitbashes of the basic GameMaker Studio platformer/shooter templates, reskinned with a bit of lazy level design.
The plot is forgettable, a mangled Russian -> English translation and a pointless and tiresome story about the developer pretending to be a little anime girl and having his sister abducted by a witch. Yawn. That just leaves the gameplay, and that's a dogs breakfast.
The platforming genre is pretty much obsolete... just a tiny number of professionally developed platformers exist on PC and offer any real value or interest to gamers (Silksong, etc). This is nowhere near being as good as Hollow Knight or Silksong. It's easy to see why gamers ignored this in favor of modern, professionally developed 3D games. This is offering nothing new or interesting, so it's easy to see why this failed.
The game is very very short and can be finished in an hour. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than an hour or so if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than some free game demos.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
Controls and handling are janky and erroneous in places... the die hard platformer fans (both of them) would tell you that your controls in these games need to be precise and accurate, if you hit the jump button, you have to jump, not guess when you might. Same for aiming and so on... this is truly janky and unpolished.
Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.
This game fails on the visuals because of the use of incredibly lazy, ugly pixelcrap. The developer would probably argue this is a "deliberate artistic choice" but we all know it's because the developer was incapable of producing anything better. The game looks very poor compared to professionally developed games. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant, this looks bad because of that developer decision. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's a disservice to gamers when developers don't bother doing their jobs and creating contemporary, high quality visuals. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are rare exceptions that succeeded [i]in spite[/i] of their awful graphics. Pixelcrap is never really okay, and there's no excuse for games that look this bad.
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, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Game Dynasty has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
These technical shortcomings push this game below minimum standards for any competently developed modern PC game.
[quote][b][url=https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-notices/16-cfr-part-465-trade-regulation-rule-use-consumer-reviews-testimonials-final-rule]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/b]
This game features an (admittedly small) number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian, broken English or ChatGPT AI slop, 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 the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
Due to the 2024 FTC ruling (16 CFR § 465.4, 15 U.S.C. § 45), these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law.[/quote]
Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers. Is this game one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Shiro has the preposterous price of $13 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games.
For comparison, the $13 asking price for this game could get you games like "Halo: The Master Chief Collection", "Valheim" or "SCUM". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
No pixelcrap is worth $13. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
