The Ghost Cage

RPG Maker strikes again! "The Ghost Cage" is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. Notably, the "developer" couldn't work out how to use RPG Maker to make a JRPG (the only thing it can do, and it's terrible at it). Instead, we have a short pointless e-book/adventure "game" about the developers imaginary girlfriend or something, submitted to a game jam as if he really wrote it instead of stamping out garbage with a construction kit. I mean... that has to be the worst game jam ever when they take asset flips and give them awards. . As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. This is not a sincerely made product, it was made for a game jam, which is a problem. It was done in a constrained period of time; professional game development takes years of effort from teams of talented and qualified people. A "game" slapped together in a weekend by an amateur simply isn't going to have any value for gamers, and that plays out clearly with this shovelware. Also, products created in game jams were never intended for gamers, they exist only to stroke the ego of amateur developers who can't get a real job in the industry. When developers, especially untalented ones, put themselves before gamers, garbage like "The Ghost Cage" is the inevitable result. It's improper for shovelware like this to be published through Steam Direct, because it's harmful. This half-baked, rushed, non-professional product, not designed for gamers, is taking up space on the Steam store that should be given over to genuine, talented developers who do the right thing and make fully developed, not rushed products for gamers. This makes it harder for gamers like you and me to find these genuinely made products. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. 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? Nope. I didn't have to pay for this, but I still feel like I got scammed.