The Glow

This game is a short and neat little semi-roguelike game with some pretty polished graphics and sound (though a bit repetative). I say semi-roguelike because the game shuffles tiles around, but the tiles themselves are the same, just moved around sometimes. The randomness can be unforgiving, especially due to the fact that one of the primary gameplay elements is stealthing around wandering enemies. Many times I would enter a room and be immediately spotted, often starting combat due to not wanting to lose my precious food. The enemies are also fairly repetative, with overworld sprites often indicating the type of encounter you will have, ie: if there's only one person and its one of the other possible playable characters, you can recruit them. All in all, a pretty neat, short, punishing game. And I do love that this is not early access or anything like that. Why do I not reccomend this? The game is extremely mechanics heavy, with no real narative or mystery to really move it along, but the mechanics are fairly boring, with not a lot of strategy in combat or while sneak-looting. The randomness doesn't really add a sense of freshness on every replay, but instead a rather large ammount of arbitraty success. I would die on a first combat encounter because the only loot I found was food and no better equipment. The next go-around I could find a revolver and ammo in the first container I looked in. There is no real curve of progression, since character traits are decided at the beggining of the game. I also encountered several game breaking movement bugs that made me restart because I had gotten randomly frozen in place and could no longer move my character, resulting in being seen and dying or needing a straight restart. This is barely a not reccomend, and mostly because of the bugs. I totally get that there will be bugs, but the ones that break the game just ruin the experience for me. Edit// I love the support from the developer wanting to fix the bugs. Its great to see people fixing stuff after it realeases. I'm gonna play some more and see if the game draws me a bit more

I really like this game. It is, however, broken in a lot of ways. The dialogue and text sound, at times, as if they were written by someone who's first language wasn't english, ie. "Oh thank god! I thought I was goner!". The textures sometimes fault, and if you try to skip the pre-conflict dialogue by clicking, sometimes it will freeze the game and render everything unclickable. Your character stands against no enemy models, just hovering hitpoints. The game also occasionally just freezes. Sometimes you can still walk around but doors are unusable or things are unclickable. (NOTE: I believe the game is still being patched for bugs). Another mechanic I don't understand is sometimes if you are caught trying to steal from humans, you enter battle with them...but they're zombies now. As opposed to being normal, talking people just before. The game requires you to collect "Essences" to purchase extra trait points in game...however one of them seems entirely unaccessible. This could just be me being bad at the game, but I can't find a single way to get to it. The game throws you into the muck with only a knife, and due to the random spawning you're sometimes immediately thrown up against a gang of up to 4 people, often with guns and armor. It is a cumbersome experience to set up your character, click through the opening dialogue, and have to loot your apartment, only to die instantly and have to do it all again. There is also no map so it is extremely easy to get lost. Not sure if this is a flaw or just a function put in to emphasize the chaos and confusion. That all being said, this is a charming and very engaging game. The pixel art is beautifully done, vibrant, bright, and spooky. The game mechanics are very well sketched out, despite the few minor flaws. The combat is quick to learn and either very rewarding, or very stressful (which is good, it's meant to be!). I sat down and played half of the game, then decided I enjoyed it so much I wanted it to last...however I went back to it not two hours later and completed it. It is UNBELIEVABLY satisfying to beat objectives. I still intend to play more of this game, because it's so exciting to discover all the little nooks and crannies and rooms and items. I fully recommend and really like this game. Please buy it and support the creators in (hopefully) future endeavors!!! <3

The developer abandoned the game. None of the in-game unlockables save, or even actually unlock. The game should be removed.

Review link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bEXyVKdEko&feature=youtu.be i have to say i did enjoy this title. couple things were off such as typos and i wish the background/lore got explained a little but all in all i found myself enjoying my time with it. if you enjoy turn based combat and roguelike aspects in a game, this is a great economical choice. i havent run inot many bugs or glitches. One occurance happened, while in combat, for some reason my character kept skipping turns causing death and ultimatly a restart. regardless of that one occurance i enjoy the title. Below i linked a playthrough of the first mission to show a demo of the game for anyone who wants a little content before purchase.

(FD: Review copy provided by developer.) THE GLOW has its flaws; it's short, shakily written and, at times, excruciatingly frustrating but its vicious combat system and strict enforcement on not running before you can walk (or at least not picking fights with a gang of shotgun-wielding bandits before you've got something better than a fistful of rocks to throw at them) make it a fiendishly addictive effort. Set in a post-disaster world ripped apart by earthquakes, you'll attempt to guide your characters to victory through six main scenarios with varying objectives such as gathering pills, killing a certain amount of enemies or tracking down a lost party member. You'll have to manage hunger, tiredness and sanity levels as you go by scavenging food, securing safe places of rest and tracking down Red Pills to keep your madness in check. Failure to do so will cause parades of powerful monsters to begin appearing all over the map, an event that even the most well-armed party may struggle to deal with. THE GLOW's semi-randomized map and item generation is both the source of its replay value and its biggest frustrations. In one game, you may well be armed to the teeth within a minute or two. In another, you'll be stranded in a map surrounded by enemies, wielding nothing but a knife that might as well be a rubber chicken for all the good it's going to do you. Guns are king in THE GLOW. The first two rounds of the combat system are exclusively for ranged weapons, meaning that by the time you have an opportunity to show off your close-quarters prowess, you're clinging miserably to the hinges of death's door anyway. There are some that will grow immediately aggravated with the patience needed to navigate this kind of merciless food chain but I found the process of building up an armoury and a trio of allies before wreaking revenge on my oppressors, who had bullied me for food and forced me to skulk through the alleys like a rat, immensely satisfying. It lacks polish, plot and any sort of serious direction but the core gameplay is enough to put it over the top for a recommendation from me. Definitely one to build on. Full review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fbPKTw_RQM

RECENT UPDATE HAS LEFT UNLOCKABLES UNLOCKABLE I repeat, in this version, the unlockables do not unlock as they are supposed to. It treats everything as a failure. A recent update must have created the bug in the coding because I've seen playthroughs where it worked fine. If anyone knows how to contact the developer that'd be great.

I played this back when it was just a mod and I will say that it has been greatly improved upon and it is worth the price.

Game doesn't work right. The short version is that no matter what I do or complete, none of the characters or achievements that are supposed to become unlocked are available. I completed the first mission 3 different times, as well as the second mission once, and each time it would say "New characters unlocked!" without actually doing so or giving me the achievement for it. Considering the game is basically progression based in completing these missions, I'm only able to play as 1 of 6 characters, and can't get to the final 2 missions (which make up the core experience, as the first 5 missions are more or less tutorials). I can only hope I'm one of the few this is happening to, but I really doubt that's the case.

The Glow initially holds a lot of promise and seems to be a fun game, and at first once I decided to stop complaining about the success curve it was... Until I realized it literally can't be completed. There are several bugs in this game, ranging from annoying to entirely game breaking. One bug, or perhaps simply poorly coded event, I encountered was the way in which the NPCs react to you. Being that the game relies on stealth elements, it makes sense that an NPC having a direct line of sight on you is grounds for some sort of event or encounter. However, there doesn't seem to be much thought put into how an NPC spots you. It seems if they happen to look anywhere near your general direction they will spot you, regardless of how far away you are or even if you are on the same row/column as they are. Another thing I encountered that upset me was rooms that are obviously capable of being entered (I can tell because when I move my cursor over the spot it turns into the boot icon that lets me know the door can be opened) yet the player cannot go inside. One such area is the room where the survivor Eric spawns during playthroughs that aren't his. Eric is pacing around on the far left, while there is a door on the far right that leads into a room where you can see an item. Despite the game telling me I can enter the room, there is no way for me to get into it and get to the items inside. The dialogue of the game, while not painfully unreadable, could have easily been fixed to seem more natural. My biggest complaint however, and one that based on the reviews was addressed some time ago and has still not been fixed, is the complete lack of ability to save the game and resume it at a later date. I'm not referring to the inability to save while on a mission so you won't have to restart when you fail, (although in all honesty that would be a lovely feature) I am referring to when you successfully complete a mission and the game gives you the chance to return to the menu or continue playing. If you continue playing, you simply go on until you inevitibly run out of supplies (they do not regenerate) or you are killed by a stupidly overpowered eyeball because you, ya know, RAN OUT OF SUPPLIES. So continuing on the map is pointless. Choosing to return to the menu of the game however, reveals that your progress was not saved and despite the fact you successfully completed the mission, it did not register and not only do you not have the unlocked character you were promised, but you do not have the collected Essence you may or may not have picked up while running from eyeballs and zombies. Because there is no way for the game to track your Essence or the fact you completed the missions, there is no way for you to then play the later missions which require the ones before them to be completed. It seems the only record of your completed missions are on your Steam profile, evidence of your triumph despite the games lack of any SAVE system. Now that I have so thoroughly destroyed this game, I do have a few positive things to say in hopes that perhaps the developers will listen and cultivate them (Unlikely) or another party will somehow find this and make their own creation based on this system. The scavenging system was very nice compared with the mechanics of Hunger and Sanity. While they both seemed to decrease at an uncomfortably fast rate, with some grit and careful rationing I was able to keep a majority of my party with full bellies and barely sane enough to be kept out of the looney bin. The fact that Sanity had visible effects on the map was a nice touch as well, as it helped to provide me with more cues as to when I needed to take my medicine and to add some depth to the otherwise monotone landscapes. I seemed to notice that Hunger also affected Sanity, and characters who were actively starving seemed to lose theirs faster than someone who wasn't worried that they would starve in the next few hours. The Stamina that had affects in and outside of battle was another nice touch, as running on the overworld map decreased the Stamina that was available for me to use in battles. Therefore, I needed to be careful I wasn't running all willy-nilly through the city. I haven't stumbled across many games in the style of The Glow on the engine used, (either RPG Maker VX Ace or XP based on controls, menus, and tilesets) and I also wish to tip my hat to the developers for that as well.

Sent this email to Steam Support for them to ignore: "Look, I'm not expecting you to refund me - I know it's way past due. But this game is busted and leaving it up on the storefront is disingenuous. The game files are either so broken or simply have not been created so that you cannot unlock more than 2 levels. Looking into the file, it looks like it's broken but the dev doesn't seem to care enough to pull the game, fix it or answer their emails. Please consider removing it so other people don't get duped."