Stoneshard: Prologue

"Stoneshard: Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Stoneshard". Stoneshard is a very mediocre 2D retro pixel RPG dungeon crawler (because plot is hard) that gleefully stole a bunch of icons from World of Warcraft, pixelated them, and claimed them as their own... just the tip of the iceberg of creative bankruptcy there, it just gets worse the more you look at the sketchy, failed, but fully priced project. Also it's been in development hell for 5 years... it's pretty clear the developers are acting in bad faith. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Stoneshard, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Stoneshard: Prologue" too. The purpose of this advertisement is to get you to shell out a whopping $25 (plus another $10 USD worth of DLC, so $35... $35 for pixelcrap, what a scam) on buying Stoneshard, and I don't recommend you do that either. 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. 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 inocuous 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. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.