The Mors is a fairly basic Unity asset flipped first person horror adventure, one of many hundreds, if not thousands of these glutting Steam. The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unity asset store assets, arranged them haphazardly in a first person adventure game template, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.
Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.
Some effort went into arranging other people's assets into a game (and then trying to pass them off as if the developer had made them). There's a bit to explore, some puzzles to solve and an emphasis on stealth gameplay, but overall it's an unpolished, shallow experience... the ethics of plagiarism aside, gamers don't like asset flips because the people who aren't talented enough or resourced enough to build their own bespoke game environments also tend to lack the other skills required for successful game development and, as usual, it shows... this offers nothing that hundreds of other similar asset flips on Steam offer, even the Russian cash grab ones.
The Mors didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Close Call", dodging a monster, trivial to get, but less than 23 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, even the people who own this game weren't interested in it.
The poor quality of this game is also 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 3 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.
This kind of asset flipping isn't harmless. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games from ethical developers. It makes it harder for genuine indie developers, who put hard work into trying to make real games, to find an audience for their products. It gives indie developers a bad name.
So, should you buy this asset flip? Is this better than any of the 100,000+ genuinely made games on Steam? Of course not!
The Mors has the gamer gouging price of around $5 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 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer claims this is their first time trying to make a game. If I went to a restaurant, got sick from eating bad food, and got told "The chef is new and has never cooked food before", would that make it okay? No, it wouldn't. The developer supplied a very valid reason why this should never have been put up for sale on Steam in the first place.
The developer complains that they "worked very hard" to make this, therefore it cannot be a bad product. What bizarre rubbish. If I had "worked hard" for years and the result was this godawful game, I'd be utterly ashamed of my failure. Hard work doesn't mean quality work, it just highlights the incompetence here.
For us gamers, for whom games are made (the developer seems to have forgotten that), it doens't matter if GTA:V was made by one guy in a shed over the space of a weekend and Depression Quest took 1000 staff working for 5 years to make, what matters is the resultant quality of the product. You can see the intellectual dishonesty of the developer made apparent from their comments.
The developer brazenly admits to taking assets from asset stores and slapping his own name on them to convince gamers he created those assets... this is plagiarism, it's intellectually, morally and creatively bankrupt.
I'm sure every single Russian asset flipper who's games I've had the misfortune to review, and were every bit as bas as this rejected shovelware would also say their asset flip is a "labour of love".
Remember, gamers, before you consider buying this (I know, I'm joking, nobody in their right mind would buy an asset flip like this), SteamDB doesn't lie. The peak player count of only 3 people loading this up and then immediately deleting it is a damning indictment; This asset flip is a complete and utter failure, and the plagiarism and other asset flip qualities of this "work" are certainly the main contributors.
The intellectual dishonesty from the developer on this, and their partially AI LLM generated text response is simply reprehensible. It's why Valve puts up their policy for developer responses.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of those Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
