Lucky me has the dubious honour of being the first to review "Winslow", which certainly is a different game, but not necessarily a good one.
Winslow is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
In this case, one or two things have been done well (voice over, carrying a narrative through gameplay rather than "tell, don't show" VN text), and a plethora of things have been done very badly.
One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.
This is a simple side-scrolling adventure/puzzle platformer. The story centers on a boy who enters a shadowy underworld. You navigate a labyrinth, find keys, solve color-based puzzles, and avoid enemies, all the while an admittedly charming (and hopefully not AI voiced) narrator relates the story... something that is never usually done, but adds a welcome element of depth to an otherwise dead on arrival platformer. Unfortuntely, no subtitles, which really is a must (not every gamer is hearing capable, but games should facilitate as many gamers as possible... it's not hard to add subtitles). But this glaring omission is just the tip of the iceberg for things that must be done and haven't been done in the development of this game.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
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.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
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.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying sound/background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop it using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
See this recurring theme? This is because [b]the game has no options menu at all!!!![/b] This is a failure of immense proportions.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game library/engine, GDevelop. It's rarely used, because it's arguably worse than construction kits like GameMaker Studio, RPGMaker and Clickteam Fusion, but it's also much harder to work with. Despite this, GDevelop has very limited capabilities, which go some way to explaining the poor quality of the game. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
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.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 120,000+ games on Steam?
Winslow is relatively cheap at $1 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]
