The Secret Life of Dorian Pink

I've played far less entertaining games and (unfortunately) paid more for them. Unapologetically queer, relatively easy to follow... a fun time! It doesn't take itself seriously and it's campy as hell (in a good way). I wish it was longer, but considering it's free I don't feel it's fair to dock it for that. The art style is fun and the color scheme is fantastic. The only glitch I ran into was observing the fountain in front of Henry's house; I am not the only one who has run into this problem. Unfortunately because of that moment, Steam was not able to save the time I spent in game or keep track of achievements despite finishing the game. I don't know how much it will stick with me, but it was delightful for a cozy night in and I would certainly recommend it considering the high, high price of $0.

"The Secret Life of Dorian Pink | Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "The Secret Life of Dorian Pink". The Secret Life of Dorian Pink is an LGBTQIA+ friendly high school literature club dropout fan-fiction about Oscar Wilde (no really). It was a complete and utter failure with only 4 players, presumably students writing papers on just how bad literature pretending to be a video game can get. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not The Secret Life of Dorian Pink, 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 Secret Life of Dorian Pink | Prologue" too. Usually adverts are intended to get people to pay money for a product, but in this case The Secret Life of Dorian Pink is also free, so I guess the developer had no idea at all what they were doing. Regardless, that makes this pointless because if you want a bad time reading godawful fan-fiction, you can get the whole thing for free. This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash (but that product is also "free"). Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. 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. 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.