The Desert's Rose

The Desert's Rose is an indie/amateur 3D VR exclusive Unreal engine based first person adventure game. Gameplay consists of wandering aimlessly around various low poly, low quality 3D VR environments and interacting with various things. Like Table Manners but without as much feedback. The game is firmly and deeply in development hell, with no evident plan or probability of being finished, although it did get an update around 2 months earlier than this review. Regardless, it's evidently unfinished. This seems to have been made a VR exclusive to prevent any comparison with non-VR 3D games, a comparison that this game would fail very badly at. Developers must learn that while VR is great, if the only thing that makes the game great is the VR, then the game isn't great at all. The game failed to garner any interest from gamers, only 2 people logged on concurrently when the game launched. Now it's only one logon every couple of weeks, presumably the developer. That's out of 120,000,000 gamers on Steam, the game, despite being free, could only attract player numbers in the single digits. This game serves to highlight the ongoing failure of Valve's Early Access programme. Like Greenlight before it, Early Access doesn't serve gamers interests, it only encourages developers to dump incomplete products onto the store, and make it harder for gamers to find genuine, complete products, and it makes it harder for developers who do the right thing and publish completed games on Steam. While this is free, Steam isn't a dumping ground for student projects and vague attempts... places like Kongregate and Itch.IO are more suitable. Because this is a poor quality game that may never be completed, it's impossible to recommend to any gamers, even for free. If you want a good VR experience, try Half-Life: Alyx. [quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote] The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says: [quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote] The developer offers the explanation that the game is incomplete because they lack the required staff levels and budget to complete the game. This certainly [i]explains[/i] why this game is deep in development hell with no sign for completion, but it does not [i]excuse[/i] it. The developer tries to offer their own, personal definition of what they [i]think[/i] Early Access is. Unfortunately this is not close to reality, and fabricating their own reality to try to excuse their failure here is simply a delusion that is a disservice to the people who matter... the gamers. Despite the developers empty assurances here, the game was an abject failure, SteamDB does not lie, and the developer has already failed to meet their promise to launch the game on schedule. Vague platitudes about intending to finish the game from the developer stand in stark contrast to the established facts, this is a broken game deep in development hell and there's absolutely zero reliable indication that it will be completed. My review stands unaltered, despite the developers pointless response. It's simply not worth wasting your time to download this. And that's perhaps somewhat redundant, SteamDB clearly shows gamers aren't interested in this. Can't argue with the facts.