"Syuukun in Mirror World" is a weird and really badly made "art" disaster... the developer pushes this as a "walking sim" but that wasn't my experience with the game, it's more of a puzzler as you control an avatar stuck in a mirror and need to guide them out. The godawful crap visuals and weak technical implementation are described away as "art" choices... I don't buy it, lamest excuse ever for just being bad at game development. And it's okay to be bad at game development, just don't publish crap you know is bad where gamers can see it! We're here for real games!
It's true that games can be art, of course... art is where the pinnacle of creativity, craftsmanship and expertise come together to form something greater than the sum of its parts. This product does a poor job of all of those three. The Mona Lisa would not be hanging in the Louvre if she was drawn as a stick figure in crayon on a napkin.
This comes across as something unambitious and "simple" in terms of implementation and technical quality and depth, more like a game dev tutorial or an experiment. It's a classic case of a developer prioritizing the low effort needed to get a game listed on Steam over the actual delivery of a technically sound or compelling product. Whatever is needed to hammer out something "good" enough for Steam Direct self-publishing.
The graphics here are particularly awful, low poly trash with MS-Paint textures and billboards... it's some of the worst I've ever seen, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment.
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.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers.
This game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 5 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
This one scores a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher quality alternatives on Steam.
Finally, I write these reviews to try help people navigate the thousands of games on Steam so they don't waste time on low quality products. There's over 140,000 games on Steam... Steam Direct is allowing an influx of around 40-50 new games [i]every day![/i]. If you think I'm wrong about this one, go ahead and add it to your library, download it, install it, play it and see for yourself. Maybe you'll come to agree with me after wasting your time. Either way, consider writing your own reviews too. I'm just glad if my review helps give gamers enough info to make a better informed choice.
