RPG Maker strikes again!
"Welcome to the Ungdung Cafe" is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality assets coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.
Notably, the "developer" couldn't work out how to use RPG Maker to make a JRPG (the only thing it can do, and it's terrible at it). Instead, we have what is mostly just an e-book, and the e-book plot goes roughly like this... the author is a teacher and he gets a crush on an underage student then meets her again later at a school reunion so he opens a coffee cart... yeah the author is expressing a fantasy about a teacher dating a (once underaged) student. It's incredibly creepy, cringey stuff.
As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality 2D retro "art", looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
It's worth noting this contains some bespoke "art" instead of the usual copy + pasted Kadokawa stock RPG Maker assets, making this slightly less of an asset flip. We can tell it's bespoke "art" because it looks considerably worse than the usual asset flipped RPG Maker assets. This is an even worse outcome from a gamer perspective. Gaming is a visual medium and developers should at least attempt to be competent and delivering quality, contemporary 3D visuals.
The graphics in this e-book are so bad, in fact.. it's a blend of some of the worst pixelcrap I've seen plus basic MS-paint assets. And yet all of that awfulness is still dwarfed by this being a book about a guy trying to date a student.
There's no English translation for the this, but that's okay. The language of bad products is universal.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
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 3 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.
