RPG Maker strikes again!
"DOLL EYE: CHAPTER ONE" is one of hundreds of low effort RPG Maker kitbashes spamming the store.
This is notable because instead of being a pure asset flip like most of the RPG Maker kitbashes are, made up of stock RPG Maker assets the "developer" just copy + pastes + puts their own name on, this instead has completely bespoke artwork. Artwork that was made in MS-Paint from the looks of it... it's hard to believe, but the artwork on this garbage is WORSE than the stock RPG Maker assets most people plagiarize.
As with all RPG Maker games, this is the result of a really bad construction kit game engine being misused. Like all RPG Maker "games", it looks bad in fullscreen and lacks HD support or graphics options... RPG Maker's purpose is to let people who lack the talent to actually make real video games to make bad Final Fantasy ripoffs. This is not acceptable for modern PC gamers.
The argument must be made that construction kit toys like RPG Maker are intended for making small games, toys and demos to pass around with friends, and should never be used as a substitute for professional game development.
Worse, the developer here couldn't actually work out how to create a JRPG with RPG Maker (the only thing RPG Maker can do, and it's terrible at that as well, by the way). Instead, they made a lightweight adventure game that serves primarily as a vessel to pump out some of the cringiest, saddest high school anime club fan-fiction writing ever to worsen the concept of human literature.
There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time.
We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle.
The e-book plot itself is incomplete and seems orientated around being a "prologue" with the possible intention of charging money for the rest of the book, which is being published separately. There's no reason for this when the developer could just add the additional content (if they ever make it, we all pray they don't) as a patch to this... so the assumption should be that they are publishing the rest of this garbage separately so they can charge money for it. Which would make this garbage just an advertisement. Also not okay.
So, storywise, this crap fan-fiction is an attempt from a failed author to provide a cringe filled, edgy attempt at horror and parents suffering from the loss of their children. Which is ironic because trying to read the garbage writing in this "barely a game" e-book causes a great deal of suffering to anyone unfortunate enough to try to read it.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers.
As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash from future chapters (otherwise they would just add that content as patches to this entry). Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time.
It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos
While it might seem like an innocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace.
It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers.
In terms of public reception, the "free" price tag didn't help. This peaked at a handful of players and then immediately cratered. With a peak count of less than 50 gamers (out of over 130 million gamers and over 40 million daily logons), it’s safe to say the PC gaming community has collectively decided to ignore this, probably because of the reasons supplied in this review.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
I can't recommend this. I didn't have to pay for this, but I still feel ripped off.
