Providentia Academy

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would love to be able to play more. just find this game and im in love wish it was a longer game. going to keep it to see if anything added on but really really would like more of the game to play great game

From Jamk University of Applied Sciences, students got a homework assignment to make "Providentia Academy." The students were clearly mistaught that it's fine to release obsolete 2D games in the 3D era. 3D graphics cards became ubiquitous in every single gaming PC ever since the 1990's when the ATI Rage and Voodoo3 hit the scene. Any professional development business that sees a prospective hire who doesn't know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's with the Voodoo3 and ATI Rage probably isn't going to give them a job. Bad for the students, and what is this delivering for us gamers in the 3D gaming era?

The students made what could only be called a game in the most tortured sense... this is at best a kind of e-book that you read with a bit of point and click movement between different text passages. No educational institution should be telling students that books are the same thing as games. It's madness.

The plot for the "VN" is just an incredibly lame story about the developers imaginary crushes with a horror/murder backdrop. The murder is the reputation of the Finnish gaming industry. The horror is that anyone would think this would be good enough to publish anywhere people might see it... it's pure cringe.

When institutions flood the store with low quality 2D video game homework assignments, we have to question what value they have for gamers. They're not fully fledged games, they don't even have 3D graphics. It might make the students feel good about themselves to get this published on Steam Direct, but gamers have to wade through this stuff just to find the professionally made, fully fleshed out 3D games we really want.

It's difficult to call this a game, because of all the endless, badly written e-book/visual novel fanfiction text, which takes prime position in front of gameplay or anything PC gamers look for in a PC game. The "author" fails to grasp the important game design axiom, "Show, don't tell". You just get stuck reading walls of mediocre text, where they should have related the story through the mechanics of the game. My gaming PC is not an e-reader. We don't come to a shop for PC games looking for badly written fan-fictions.

Despite not being in Early Access, it's obvious this is an incomplete product. Developers have an obligation to deliver complete, not partially done products to gamers, that shouldn't be controversial. Whatever the excuses may be, it does no service to gamers for incomplete products polluting Steam like this. It makes it harder for gamers to find complete games, and it makes it harder for ethical developers who do the right thing to find their audience.

The graphics aren't great, fdasfds. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.

Now onto pricing and value.

It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say.

There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers?

It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff.

In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone.

A peak of 3 concurrent players (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.

Since this is more of a student tech demo than a full, genuinely made game for gamers, and offers no Steam features, like a +1 to your game count, I can't recommend downloading this over a full, professionally made game, of which there are thousands here on Steam.