The Supernatural Power Troll is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This isn't a sincerely or genuinely made game, it's made for a game jam.
Nobody took this seriously as a game, it's a dismal failure, but if you decide to do so, you'll quickly understand why it failed. It's a craptastic platformer with a couple of gimmicks, borrowing the "carry stuff" mechanism from Super Mario Bros 2 and the ability to give "powers" to entities you throw things at... but the garbage technical implementation of this game jam crapware renders any deep consideration of gameplay moot.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window.
The visuals in this game are a complete joke, it's seriously just a bunch of MS-Paint sprites/images that look like they were lazily scrawled out over the space of a couple of hours. Like, with the mouse, it doesn't look like they even used a Wacom tablet or anything. It's so bad even pixel "art" would look better than this. Pure MSPaint. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
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.
They decided to use a bizarre, robotic and unnatural text-to-speech system for dialogue in the game. I'm sure the developer thought they were very clever to find a way around having to pay for a talented voice actor, but the awful robotic voices are [i]worse[/i] than no voices at all.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2025 (and this was released not so far back in 2024), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
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 game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
As noted earlier, it's important to mention that this isn't a sincerely made, professional game, it's a Game Jam/demo project. Game Jam and other student/project games are not made for gamers, they're made for the benefit of stroking the ego of developers. It's obviously not possible for a game slapped together over a few days to be of the same quality as a properly, sincerely made game from a full development team with a full budget who take the right amount of time and put in genuine hard work to create a product for gamers. Sure, it is possible to slap together a game in such a manner, unprofessionally. This is a lot like driving a car using only your feet. Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it's a good idea, and often ends up in disaster.
I'm sure they think it's remarkable they were able to make a game without dedicating the right resources and talent to the job, but we must ask why this benefits gamers... and it doesn't. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience.
Even worse, they are charging money for Game Jam garbage... this is downright unethical.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?
The Supernatural Power Troll is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
