The Riese Project - Prologue

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"The Riese Project - Prologue" is is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "The Riese Project". The Riese Project is a poorly made, almost certainly asset flipped Polish VR adventure game with some of the jankiest lack of optimisation yet seen on a VR game... you may suffer permanent damage trying to play it, it's so jank. If they ever release the full product... this advert has been abandoned for 15 months, and it's a shoddy mess. What else can we say about how the full product will turn out? So much for The Riese Project. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not The Riese Project, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "The Riese Project - Prologue" too. Usually the purpose of these advertisements is to get you to shell out money to the developer to buy the full product, but the developer hasn't bothered actually making a product you can buy, leaving this as an advertisement for nothing. We must question what value this pointless advertising has for gamers... and the answer is "none". Due to the poor public response amongst gamers for this advertisement, it seems unlikely the developer will go on to make the full product. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $7 USD for this. Yes, they were CHARGING MONEY FOR AN ADVERTISEMENT. This is utterly unacceptable. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 7 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts. [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 developers bizarre and snarky response doesn't even bring up the fact they tried to scam people out of money for an advertisement for a product they will never make. The arrogance is astounding... no time to work on making a game or refund any of the money they swindled, but all the time in the world to pore over game reviews and passively aggressively attack reviewers like this. It gets worse. The "developer" tacitly argues that I review a lot of games, therefore this game review isn't valid or truthful. Huh. If I changed all my other reviews to positive, would the graphics and gameplay of this crap game suddenly improve? No. The developer seeks any possible angle to throw shade at me personally to discredit my review. You can see what they are trying to do. If this was the only review I have ever written, would that change any of the properties of this advert or alter the facts contained in my review? Of course not. [b]My reviews for actual games have no bearing on the dismal quality of this failed advertisement[/b]. Nothing in the developers pointless and appalling breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this paid advertisement to anyone.