Rogue Harvest is an abandoned early access 2D retro pixel top down JRPG looking survival/crafting/mining game with no content and no clear objective, that will never be completed and only exists on Steam as a cash grab to scam gamers into buying an incomplete and abandoned product. The idea is fine, survival/crafting games are popular, but that doesn't mean this is worth a moment of your time, it's garbage.
The game was abandoned roughly a year prior to the "launch" on Steam and hasn't been updated in almost 7 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed.
Despite not being in Steam Early Access (where this arguably belongs), the game is missing features and is apparently incomplete. Due to the lack of meaningful progress from the developer, it's unlikely the game will be completed at all, yet the developers reprehensively have their hand out for money for an incomplete game. This is a good reason for gamers to avoid this. It's unclear why the developer set out to mislead gamers by exiting Early Access without finishing the game, but it's evidently incomplete (the title screen has a "Early Access Build" disclaimer on it!).
The developer makes the admission, almost proudly, that they failed to allocate sufficient budget, staff, and other resources to the development of this game. It's a solo project. Game development is a serious endeavour that should not be approached lightly. This is a lot like trying to drive a car using only your feet. It can be done, perhaps, but it's almost certain to end in disaster. Trying to to the job wrong, on purpose, will not result in a product that has high value for gamers, as the "developer" has done here, with a predictably disastrous outcome.
While I can't confirm this, it looks a lot like the game pixel assets and tilesets are plagiarised... there's no mention in the credits for an asset creator, so we are left to believe this solo dev did all the work creating the game assets and engine too. Huh. Plagiarism is serious business, and could even be classified as copyright infringement given the nature of the assets stolen.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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.
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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content.
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 all-time peak player number was only 6 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.
Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount from time to time. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay.
Rogue Harvest 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, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
