Temple of Shadows

Overall Rating: 2.5/10 Duration: 2.8 hours (Dropped while chasing Perfect Game) The game was very laggy, which made the experience frustrating right from the start. The level design isn’t terrible, but the random, unrelated jumpscares completely ruin the atmosphere and feel out of place. What really made me uninstall the game was the collectibles in the first level—they just don’t exist. I spent way too much time looking for them, only to realize it was pointless. It’s not fun to repeat the same thing over and over again, especially when the game feels broken and unrewarding.

"Temple of Shadows" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Temple of Shadows (chapter 2, I guess)". Temple of Shadows (chapter 2, I guess) is not even made yet... it's a kickstarter as the developer is trying to raise funds to finish their game... ugh. There's better ways to fund a game, and it's telling whenever a developer is unable to secure funding from a publisher or elsewhere. Relying on gamers to try fund games is a horribly flawed premise that almost always ends up in disaster. Case in point, only 25% of "Early Access" games ever get made, the rest are left abandoned and polluting Steam. This playable demo/advertisement contains a short first chapter in an over ambitious adventure puzzle game with the old Indiana Jones mystery solving vibe, and who knows, if it was produced more professionally and there was an actual full game for me to review, I might even give it a rare positive recommendation. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Temple of Shadows (chapter 2, I guess), it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Temple of Shadows" too. The primary purpose of this advertisement is to direct traffic to the developers kickstarter page so you can give them money and see if they make any more content or even a complete game. I don't believe in gambling. This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 13 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.