[b][quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/quote][/b]"Sullen: Light is Your Friend" is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unity asset store packs, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.
Giving Russian and Brazilian asset flippers a run for their money once more, this time we have a Turkish entry in the race to the bottom, showing us truly that asset flip scammers transcend borders, bringing the world together for a quick scammed lira. This is your usual Russian style jumpscare game... creating such an asset flip is trivial and takes less than a weekend. First, you steal some 3D model/asset for a house/neighbourhood, drop it on a first person adventure template, fill out some stuff/add a stolen monster asset or two, and then quickly dump it on Steam as fast as possible, then wait for the cash to roll in.
This one has some 1980's imagery stapled on the front and takes place in an asset flipped neighbourhood. The developer pulled out all the stops and added a VHS filter to the template. Wander around, but don't get seen by the asset flipped monster, or you'll get jumpscared! That's the game. Same as all the other jumpscare adventure asset flips glutting Steam. Except this one is abandoned in an incomplete state (are asset flips ever complete games??).
Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.
This game has been translated from Turkish into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers.
The game was abandoned roughly 8 months after launch and hasn't been updated in almost 6 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
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. "Sullen: Light is Your Friend" 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 trying to play the asset flip, trivial to achieve, but less than 3 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 3 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.
Now, while this review has been solely about the asset flip "game", some notes about the "developer", because as I often say, while reviews are about the games, gamers must always be made aware if a developer acts unethically, because buying games from unethical developers puts your money at risk.
The developer revoked thousands of game keys from paying customers, an act of brazen fraud/theft. If you buy a game from this developer, there's no guarantee they won't revoke your key as well. They've done it before. They also switch between different developer accounts to try hide their identity... make sure to read game reviews before buying games, as many reviewers have rightly tried to warn gamers in their reviews. This is very helpful for consumers.
Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount from time to time. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay.
Furthering the unethical nature of this developer, while they are selling this incomplete game under Valve's failed Early Access program, they're abusing that program, and not working on this game full time, as they have other projects in the works. That means there's ZERO confidence anyone who buys this in Early Access will receive a complete game, and it's possible that they're being scammed.
"Sullen: Light is Your Friend" has the pathetically optimistic price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Rainbow 6 Siege", "This War of Mine" or "Battlefield V". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam.
Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.
