Allow me to ask you a question. What can purchase for $2 these days? Now, I’d like you to narrow that list down and ask yourself what you can get for that $2 that will provide you several hours of entertainment. That is one way of looking at games such as The Amazing Adventures of Ash – Afterparty, Z3roram’s debut game on the Steam platform. To be even fairer, the idea behind the game came from one of their team’s first time developers, Lisa, and this is the very first game that she has developed. But my gosh, what a fantastic first effort.
My expectations weren’t high entering the game. Thoughts of ‘meh, just another crappy RPGMaker game,’ ‘good grief this is just a cash in for the female gamer crowd,’ and ‘It’s so cheap that it has to be nasty’ filtered through my mind. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. The game immersed me into its creepy little world almost immediately. The puzzles kept me firmly entrenched. I struggled mightily early on trying to work out just what I had to do.
The lone negative review on Steam to date pinpoints the problems that some players have with RPGMaker — the technology is old and games have a tendency to look generic. However, I find that there is a certain charm that helps build immersion in the good or better games built in the engine. I do have an admission to make. I was not a fan of the engine before the creation of this site. I didn’t appreciate the games that were made in them nor the developers who made them or the publishers that published them. Steamified have now featured several games in the engine and those games have shown me that if you put your heart and hard work into the creation of your game that there are a number of different intricacies that you can make. I wont forget the unique battle system that was a huge addition in Pale Echoes, for example, or the delicate manner in which Beyond Reality handled important issues relating to science and mankind. I can say again with ease that The Amazing Adventures of Ash utilizes the RPGMaker software with bravado. It’s so much more than a generic RPGMaker game if you’re willing to give it an opportunity.
The narrative, the story and the puzzles are just flat out fun. The game had no right to suck me in the way that it did. A lot of hard work and thought went into its development. It’s a shockingly debut game for a single developer. I have to think that at some point in the future we could be hearing a lot more from Z3roram’s Lisa. There’s not much to criticize and there isn’t much to point out other than the superlatives that I have offered herein already. It’s just a really good game and at $2 you owe it to yourself to pick it up – or at the very worst pick it up when or if it ever sees itself added to an indie bundle.
If I could offer some advice it would be much as it always is. Please take full advantage of Steam as a platform. You would see sales rise if you were take advantage of adding Steam achievements and trading cards. Further, you would further gain monetarily through the Steam community marketplace with people who sell the cards. I do not understand why developers and publishers fail to take advantage of Steam. I would happily play through the game again if it allowed me to unlock achievements. As a badge collector I would certainly play more to unlock trading cards. As an open question to developers reading this, why do you not utilize what Steam offers? It seems like a no brainer from a monetary perspective and selling your games, regardless of whether or not they are a passion project (which I would hope for most indie developers it would be the case more often than not), is a business.
It is my genuine hope that Z3roram give Lisa the time and the freedom to complete more episodes in this series. Although it wont appeal to every gamer there is a player base for this game and that audience will appreciate what this game has to offer.
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