▼ Not recommended
4 hrs
"垂钓日记 The Sailor’s Guide to Game Design" is a completely garbage "more art than game" art installation dumped on Steam through Steam Direct... not really a game, but there is a bit of clicking as you simulate "fishing" as part of the overall narrative while a crap audio book is pumped out with crappy voiceover. Of course this is slapped together with the godawful Ren'Py Visual Novel construction kit, so no real game development took place here. Again, the result is barely, if at all, a game.
What do you do in the game? It's a pretentious bit of self-odor huffing from the "author" of this garbage, you just click to "fish" a bit while the cringey narrative makes you lose all hope in humanity. I mean, they had no choice but to publish this garbage here on Steam and on Itch, because the local art galleries took out a restraining order.
There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal.
Itch has one job, and it's not a hard job, but they failed again... to keep amateur stuff in their weird hugbox where everyone claps and says "Good job!!!" at every bit of amateur drivel (which nobody actually plays) and away from gamers. Unfortunately this has leaked out onto Steam platforms and now gamers have to put up with yet another bit of poorly made amateur shovelware.
So, it's hard to describe this as a game, the focus of the product is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming rig is not a kindle.
Visually, this features mediocre hand drawn style "Baby's First Wacom Tablet" art instead of contemporary graphics. This obviously looks better than pixelcrap, but that's a really low bar to barely stumble over. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks worse than a professionally made game would look, and that's a major deterrent.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
They have their hand out for a $6 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to give them money from buying empty DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off.
What do you do in the game? It's a pretentious bit of self-odor huffing from the "author" of this garbage, you just click to "fish" a bit while the cringey narrative makes you lose all hope in humanity. I mean, they had no choice but to publish this garbage here on Steam and on Itch, because the local art galleries took out a restraining order.
There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal.
Itch has one job, and it's not a hard job, but they failed again... to keep amateur stuff in their weird hugbox where everyone claps and says "Good job!!!" at every bit of amateur drivel (which nobody actually plays) and away from gamers. Unfortunately this has leaked out onto Steam platforms and now gamers have to put up with yet another bit of poorly made amateur shovelware.
So, it's hard to describe this as a game, the focus of the product is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming rig is not a kindle.
Visually, this features mediocre hand drawn style "Baby's First Wacom Tablet" art instead of contemporary graphics. This obviously looks better than pixelcrap, but that's a really low bar to barely stumble over. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks worse than a professionally made game would look, and that's a major deterrent.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
They have their hand out for a $6 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to give them money from buying empty DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off.
1 found helpful
Steam ↗
