SkeleToon:forgotten memories 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.
This completely garbage platformer looks like trash and plays like trash. Why? Because it's slapped together with the godawful no-code drag-and-drop Construct 2 game construction kit. What happened here is the "developer" got his hands on the construction kit, spent what looks like half an hour making a crappy platformer, rushed it onto Steam Direct for $100, then quickly told his imaginary girlfriend that he's a real game developer now. Ugh.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
The graphics aren't great, really low quality sprites... maybe not asset flipped because they look pretty bad, I doubt any real content creator would publish assets that look like that. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $4 USD for this (there's those delusions of grandeur again). Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. It's also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who paid money for this... nobody got refunded.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are "The Main Character". You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet The Main Character, and nobody else matters.
The developer makes it very clear from this appalling response that this was never intended as a product for gamers. The developer knew for a FACT it was not suitable to be launched on Steam at all... and this plays out with the SteamDB facts, that prove gamers never wanted this. A peak player count of only 2 very disappointed people is the definition of abject failure and incompetence.
So the developer is adamant this was never made for gamers but for his own ego, putting himself far above millions of gamers. What disgusting arrogance. And yet, even after admitting this guy knew what he was doing is wrong, he persists in leaving this crap nobody wants on Steam, because his ego is far more important than every single gamer on this platform.
Jesus wept.
This arrogant, disgusting attitude is why gamers have such a problem with unqualified, amateur developers. There's a reason these guys can't get jobs as real game developers. The developer here shows us just why this is such a problem and why it does so much harm to the gaming industry.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this garbage ego trip to anyone.
