The Orb of Darkness

I'm not really sure if "The Orb of Darkness" is an asset flip. Some elements of this game certainly make it seem like the developer put some effort into assembling some kind of original here. On the other hand, a lot of the game assets don't seem like they were created by the developer, but they haven't credited any asset creators for supplying assets, which might be a case of plagiarism. There's no evidence, so we need to give the benefit of the doubt... regardless, asset flip or not, the quality here is indistinguishable from many asset flip/cash grab scams, and that's a problem in itself. It's a very amateurish third person platformer/shooter(?) where you play a "goth" and fight various supernatural low poly enemies. This one really had me scratching my head... did the developer only rip off low quality assets, or did they make the assets themselves and just do a bad job? It's a pointless question to ask anyway, because what ultimately matters is the resultant quality... and this game has none. It would be funny if this was an asset flip, anyway, because flipping a game but using such low quality assets would be a lot like going on a shoplifting spree, but only stealing the cheap store brand stuff. Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying sound/background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop it using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. 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 2 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. So, if you could get your hands on a key for this, even though it's deleted, should you? No. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, this is impossible to recommend. It's good that this was removed from Steam.