RPG Maker strikes again!
Close Me is barely a game, it's more of an interactive art exhibition that's been dumped on Steam, presumably because the local art galleries took out a restraining order on the "artists" who had no other choice but to pay Valve $100 to dump this on Steam. See, the concept with this particular RPG Maker garbage is that it at first appears like a very simple, if somewhat depressing game where you wake up, look at some stuff, then go to bed and eventually close the game. But if you close and relaunch the game, things change, and the more you poke around and relaunch the game, the more of the underlying horror theme gets exposed.
Yeah, this isn't making art better, it's just making gaming worse. And if you think the concept seems great so why don't I give it a thumbs up, just think for a minute how amazingly successful this could have been if the developer approached the game sincerely and didn't take cheap nasty RPG Maker shortcuts as a substitute for doing the job of game development properly. Game development is a serious endeavour and should never be approached in a lazy, half baked way as the "developer" has done here. This is a disservice to gamers.
Like most RPG Maker shovelware, the game features extremely low quality 2D retro pixel 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 the developer seems to have tried to make their own art assets for this, and we can tell because this looks significantly [i]worse[/i] than the stock RPG Maker assets the so-called "developers" who use it try to pass off as their own work. So, hooray for not plagiarising stock assets, I guess.
On the technical side of things, it's an RPG Maker game so it's garbage and immediately fails all the basic tests for what meets reasonable expectations for any modern PC game.
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.
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 the hamfisted design decision to use RPG Maker as a substitute for learning how to make video games, or learning how to hire actual game developers.
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.
The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.
So, should you buy this game?
Close Me 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 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
