Elementcore Revelations: Journey Prologue

Steam recommended this game to me because it is like Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, spoiler it is not. You start the game picking between a grand total of one character, the others are grayed out. The character you get is a female elf. She has an issue as her sister is missing. She wanted to bake the female elf a cake, so rather than going to the grocery store, she went to the Obsidian Fortress to get the necessary ingredients. So to go rescue her you first go to a place in town and wait to unlock your skills. Then you go and get gear at the blacksmith. Then you exit the blacksmith and go right back since now the game wants you to upgrade your gear. Then you get to leave town and walk to the right. You keep walking for a minute (literally) before anything happens. This is when you are attacked by slimes. You can do nothing but autofight them and then you run into mushrooms. The mushrooms knock you back and to the left and stun you. Once you are unstunned you keep fighting them until you collapse. Then you are back in town to upgrade and do it again. The enemies that stun you in an autoattack AFK game show the game does not respect your time. Thus I will not give it mine.

"Elementcore Revelations: Journey Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Elementcore Revelations". Elementcore Revelations is not even released... it seems to be a bit of abandonware, yet the developer dumped an advertisement for it on Steam anyway. What it was supposed to be is some kind of very lame 2D side scrolling anime themed "roguelite" RPG of some kind, but frankly the whole thing is a bit shovelwareish, if the advert-before-product methodology shown here doesn't already demonstrate that.. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Elementcore Revelations, 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 "Elementcore Revelations: Journey Prologue" too. 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. It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this, all in Chinese. 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.

Overly simplistic, seemingly unfinished auto-battler idler. There are way too many unpolished elements: sound settings does not save and always goes back to default when you re-open the game, no way to open multiple chests, no offline progress, enemies drop equipment for other classes which are not yet released, non-intuitive UI, incomplete translation, among a slew of many other things.