Veneficium

Hay un par de bugs pero el problema más grave es que no se entiende por dónde hay que ir y no se ve nada. La trama no tiene mucha coherencia pero eso es lo de menos.

Спрятался в церкви, обидел чудовище и оно начало меня игнорировать 10/10

short, but very good sound design and unsettling horror.

"Veneficium" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from UQAT in Quebec, Canada. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. While this game visually looks great, there's nothing under the hood... almost a walking simulator, this horror themed "adventure" has you take over Abigail, a witch searching for her grandmother in a cursed forest. You use spellcasting abilities to avoid enemies and survive the night, which involves, well, walking through a pretty much straight line in a spooky forest. There's a monster. Who is he and what's his motivation? Nobody knows. I think the students intended to flesh this out but then didn't bother because the course ended. This is the problem with student projects. They're not games made for you or I, they're made for the students and nobody else. And that's a problem. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render this unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. The graphics in this game are really quite good, which at least makes the game look more appealing. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's well over 130 million gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.

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очень крутая игра, но мне страшно в нее играть