RPG Maker strikes again!
"August of August" 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/canned assets from RPG Maker 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 yet another godawful more-book-than-game high school anime club dropout fan-fiction... and who can guess what the subject is? Yes, that's right, it's the developers imaginary anime girlfriend, who is an alien. The writing is cringey, full of grammatical errors, and might make you feel a bit unwell... this is normal when reading fan-fictions about a self-publishing Steam Direct "author" and his imaginary girlfriend.
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 copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. There are, in this case, some bespoke assets. These look considerably worse than the asset flipped Kadokawa stock assets the developer has ripped off here.
RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers, and we can see that play out quite typically with "August of August".
So, it's hard to describe this as a game, the focus of the product is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming rig is not a kindle.
This game is fairly dated at 5 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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $2 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
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 11 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? What's the verdict?
Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off.
