The End: Inari's Quest is a shining example of why, if you ever see a game on Kickstarter, you should run far, far away from it. The game scraped through the Kickstarter goalpost with a $5000 budget, and man, I don't know what they did with the money. In fairness, the game visuals look fantastic... and that's it. The quality of every other aspect of the game drops sharply, from technical implementation through to a plethora of questionable design choices.
Before we get into the specifics, it's important to point out that for me at least, the game is simply unplayable because it crashes to desktop after about 30 seconds worth of gameplay, and there's no save feature either. The game is horribly unpolished and should never have shipped in the state it's in. I suspect (and hope) that the only reason they let this get out was because they felt obliged to do so for the sake of the Kickstarter backers. See why I'm saying that Kickstarted games are a really bad idea? Yeah. Releasing games in such bad shape as The End is a disservice to gamers... it makes gaming worse for everyone.
The idea here is basically a thematic ripoff of games like Shelter where you're an animal and you have to look after your baby, in this case, you're controlling a fox from third person perspective and you have to stop your kit from being eaten by rats etc... which is both frustrating and heart wrenching at the same time. I don't play video games to get my heart wrenched. Life will do that to you for free.
The frustration comes from really poorly thought out game mechanics like the only way to protect your baby is to carry it, which locks you out of other abilities.. this is more annoying than interesting.
The game doesn't have any save game features, despite that being a basic standard for all games of this time. The developer might defend this as an attempt to make the game seem more "difficult" without them having to balance the game or do their job properly with engaging and challenging level design, but it's just as likely they simply couldn't work out how to make a save game feature work. Either way, that's a defect that adds another reason for gamers to avoid this game.
The game is very very short and can be finished in about an hour. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than 2 hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than some free game demos.
On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers. The customisable controls are critical because the developers seriously didn't know that WASD is the default movement layout on PC. Like... what planet did these guys come from?
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Because the game is broken and unplayable for me, it may also not work for other gamers. This is a solid reason to approach this game with some scepticism.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
The End: Inari's Quest has the total ripoff price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
