RPG Maker strikes again!
Subterra is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.
As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
This time Andorlea/Warfare/SimProse/whatever other shell account this guy uses to try hide his identity has once more stamped out a painfully generic copy + paste RPG Maker asset flip.
It's horribly basic, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, full of stock copy + pasted RPG Maker assets... no real game development has taken place here, this is just a cash grab, it's shovelware polluting Steam for profit. It's a linear mess with a copy + pasted story and as many flipped assets as the developer could be bothered to drag and drop in the construction kit. This "developer" has dumped over 100 copy+pasted RPG Maker asset flips onto Steam, and keeps pumping out minimum viable product RPG Maker asset flips as rapidly as possible to try gouge gamers.
We must ask why this ongoing pollution has any serious value for gamers or the gaming industry. This kind of cash grab construction kit shovelware from bad actors like Andorlea gives amateur developers a bad name. This pollution takes marketing space away from genuine indie developers who are doing the right thing, and making real games instead of copying+pasting premade assets in a children's video game construction kit. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games. This pollution is harmful to Steam, to gamers and the gaming industry.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Subterra has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finding a fountain (this happens very early in the asset flip), trivial to achieve, but less than 4 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 4 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Subterra 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. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.
