Stories of Liane

"Stories of Liane" is an abandoned Early Access narrative heavy sci-fi walking sim that was so poorly recieved the developer walked away from the mess. The graphics look pretty good (so probably flipped), and there's zero optimisation at all, 30hz, motion blur... I doubt there's a developer talented enough to make such great assets but have no idea how to make them display smoothly in Unreal Engine. Sometimes if something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Anyway this is a tedious and plodding walking sim that doesn't even go anywhere because the developer abandoned it before finishing the (poorly written) story. The developers abandoned this 5 years ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games. I'm not sure if this is an asset flip, but it's one of those cases where the assets just look much better than the rest of the quality of the game... a glaring inconsistency. There's no evidence, but as always, the biggest problem with asset flips besides the plagiarism is the deplorably low quality of the other aspects of the game, and even if the game assets are genuinely created for the game, the quality of the rest of the game is indistinguishable from that of asset flips. This game is fairly dated at 5 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. You can always judge a game by how popular it is with the general public. Steam has over 130 million unique gamers, and over 40 million unique logons every day from dedicated PC gamers. But this only ever had a peak player count of a dozen or so people... that's very poor public reception. Gamers rejected this, most likely due to the reasons I supply in this review. Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library? Definitely not. This is impossible to recommend. To quote another Steam reviewer, this should be a paid product... they should be paying people to download it.