"Street of Secrets" is yet another construction kit template copy+paste from serial shovelware pushers, Snkl Studio. These guys do nothing but copy premade game templates and game tutorials, fill out a few things/stamp out basic levels using the construction kit templates, slap on an asset flipped set of sprites/assets, and dump them on Steam and into cheap nasty shovelware game bundles as cash grabs. Trying to get paid for someone else's game templates, assets... at best, this is shovelware, at worst, it's a scam/cash grab.
The "developer" used ClickTeam Fusion to asset flip out one of literally hundreds of simple, minimalist 2D line art "Find 100 Hidden turnips" or whatever games... hunt through a simple illustration to find 100 hidden things. The first time I saw one of these I thought it was a fairly okay, if short experience... but the problem is, there's literally hundreds of these plaguing the store. They're fairly low effort when you think about what's needed to make a more genuine game.
The whole thing could have been done in a web browser. We have to ask if Steam was intended to compete with Firefox, Chrome or Safari. I didn't spend thousands building a gaming rig so I could play glorified browser games.
The other problem is just how many of these there are... they're practically spamming the Steam store at this point. It's close to pollution... mass produced slop that genuine game developers have to try to compete with to get visibility for their more seriously developed games. And that's not good for gamers, or for real developers. SNKL, the Russian "developer" behind this deluge of crap fake games uses a bunch of AI slop and ClickTeam Fusion game templates to publish hundreds of valueless "minimum viable product" crapware like this. They use several shell accounts such as "Cute Hannah's Games" and "Quantum Quiver" and "Blender Games" to further hide their identity and mislead gamers into thinking they may be a genuine developer... they're not. No genuine developer copy + pastes hundreds of these fake games onto Steam like this. It's a cash grab operation.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
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 point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. 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.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). 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. 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.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like ClickTeam Fusion should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Snkl Studio 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 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 [b]only 10 players[/b]. 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 130,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 130,000+ games on Steam?
"Street of Secrets" is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.
[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]
