"The Chronicle" is a low key asset flip, a bunch of other people's assets assembled badly to make a basic game, typically this kind of thing is done by amateur developers without sufficient budget, talent and/or staff to do the job of game development professionally. It's then quickly rushed into Steam Direct. And, unsurprisingly, this never results in a product with any quality, interest, or value for gamers.
This is a bit of complete garbage as yet another amateur "developer" went on a shopping spree on FAB/the Unreal Marketplace, cludged a bunch of other people's assets onto a basic game template, and then spent $100 on Steam Direct so he could tell his imaginary girlfriend that he's a game developer.
Ostensibly the intention was to create yet another of literally thousands of Unreal based first person adventure games, but this attempt failed, resulting in a bug riddled cludgy mess that was supposed to provide a WW2 time travel adventure, but fails about as hard at doing that as it does at being a game.
So, the game might look better than you'd expect from an amateur project, but this is because it's partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Very little in this game is truly the creation of the "developer", it's just a bunch of rearranged assets.
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "The Chronicle".
Despite not being in Early Access, it's obvious this is an incomplete product. Developers have an obligation to deliver compeletd products to gamers, that shouldn't be controversial. Whatever the excuses may be, it does no service to gamers for incomplete products polluting Steam like this. It makes it harder for gamers to find complete games, and it makes it harder for ethical developers who do the right thing to find their audience.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 USD for this... that's right, this guy wanted YOUR money for someone else's Unreal assets. Never okay.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 7 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? What's the verdict?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. I didn't pay money, but I still feel ripped off.
