RPG Maker strikes again!
The Devil's Womb 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 MS-paint/"baby's first Wacom tablet" "art" 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 a more e-book than game experience, a high school writing class dropout fan-fiction with a mild horror theme about a girl/doll thing with psychological problems. It's extremely badly written to the point of being contrived and cringey.
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.
This game is fairly dated at 6 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
On pricing, this is "free" enough, 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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 9 concurrent players... 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are "The Main Character". You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet THE MAIN CHARACTER.
The developer has massive comprehension problems; nowhere in my review did I warn gamers about the use of AI Slop. However, if the developer has used a generative LLM to create any part of this game, that's a massive problem because they didn't declare it as Valve requires them to do... that would mean they are deliberately misleading gamers FOR PROFIT by trying to scam people with an AI Slop product. We must as always give developers the benefit of the doubt, no matter how incompetent they are. And incompetent is the thing... this game couldn't even get a double figure player count. SteamDB does not lie, this was a complete and utter failure.
But the developer seeks to attack me instead of accepting the truth about their failure as a game developer; this is a low quality product nobody wanted. Why attack me for that? That's a mental coping mechanism.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
The developer chooses to attack the review by failing to acknowledge the real reason they used crap pixel "art" instead of doing their job properly and arranging contemporary visuals. We all know if they were capable of doing better, they would. But they didn't... a pathetic inadequacy that should not be a problem for gamers to have to put up with. Developers like this give genuine amateur devs a bad name.
Insultingly, the "developer" delivers an [b]outright lie[/b], claiming, completely without basis in fact, that my review is written using generative AI. This is completely untrue. The developer once more attacks this review as a coping mechanism to attempt to avoid facing the facts about their failure... but this insulting dishonesty and blatant lying shows us all we need to know about this person.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
