Abermore Reviews

read the [url=https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vnpv/abermore-is-an-almost-great-bad-game]waypoint review[/url], & the twitter thread linked therein, which lays it all out. what could have been a really clever & well-scoped indie imsim, sabotaged by bad management & released essentially as an unpatchable beta. i genuinely enjoy the game when it works, but i cannot recommend it unless you have a deep well of patience & an understanding of the material conditions under which it was made. solidarity with the devs, & hoping Lady Luck sees them land on their feet ✊♥

The real master thieves are the poeple who actually charged money for this unfinished mess of a game... You can soft-lock the game at several points, some mechanics straight up doesn't work, the game is generally lacking in content and the story... well it could almost create a new term: "AberLore". If you play the game just to see how much you are able to break it then it might be a bit amusing, however I could not even attempt this as everytime i was finished with a dialogue in the game everything just froze and i had to Alt F4, meaning i could literally not even play it at all which was nice as it spared my time from wasting it on this atrocious game. The game kept throwing achivements at me everytime i closed it (which i had not earned btw), as in a desperate attempt at making me come back to it. 1/10

I really wanted to like this game since I first saw an article about it last month but at the moment theres way too many bugs (including one that softlocked me and made me restart a long level because of it) so I cant recommend this game to anyone at the moment. Im really hoping they have patches planned.

The game crashed so hard that it not only reset most of my progress, it changed my character's haircut. Lol how is that even possible? I've requested a refund. Edit: Refund denied. This "game" is a scam. Don't fall for it.

I'd love to recommend this game, truly. It has so many unique systems and the gameplay loop is solid. It's *almost* a good time. I played three or four missions with the hope of "well I've unlocked more the game and things are getting a little bit more difficult, maybe it gets better? But it doesn't. This game is ruined by the fact that it probably needed another six months of development. Bad procedural generation means that elements clip in to eachother, bad alphas on the backsides of staircases, gaps between floors, and staircases that lead nowhere. Poor UI with few button prompts for things like viewing different floors on your map. Bugs with item duplication in your inventory and hit boxes. I was really hopeful that this would finally give a stealth & heist game worth sinking my time into but unfortunately, this is not that. I hope it receives some updates and that I'll be able to return to it.

Okay, listen, we need to talk. There are at least 5 achievements that are definitely broken, probably 6 unless I can figure out who the heck Aevon Gardott is. I've written a bit of a guide that details what they are, and maybe I'll finish that up and complete what I can. After 20 hours, I feel I've given Abermore a fair shake. Though I cannot speak to its state at launch, it is far more playable than most of these reviews would have you believe. I have not once encountered a level geometry that is truly unplayable, though I've certainly encountered some ridiculous layouts and oddly placed walls. I've also encountered several times where the game hangs, especially in cut scenes, and some missions that seem pretty broken. Yes, there are some ugly seams and rough edges to point and laugh at, but I think everybody else has beat that to death. There is a fun game in Abermore. It is far from perfect, but it is fun. Should you buy it? I don't know your finances, but I picked it up when it went on sale for less than $2, and if it does that again, then sure, why not. If you're here, looking at these reviews, then I can only imagine you're waist deep in an immersive sim binge, and you've seen this mentioned offhand in a video or two. If that's you, and you're curious, add this to your wishlist and wait for the next sale. I genuinely really enjoy the writing in this game. I think they've painted a setting worth exploring, and it's hard to see when things break down. I really wish this game would get a little more support. I would happily offer my services as a Unity dev, at least just to fix those achievements and some poor data handling in the inventory grids. But I suppose that's a problem, that it's hard to say something good about Abermore without also admitting its faults in the same breath. Thing is, I don't think a lot of these reviews have even given it a chance. Maybe you bought it on the first day, and maybe it was significantly more broken at that point. I understand. That hurts. But here's the thing: reviews are weapons. You cannot call a game a scam and expect it to get fixed. If the developers had any intention of continuing support for this game, which, I don't know, not gonna hold my breath, but if they had any intention of doing so, getting overwhelmingly negative reviews would absolutely kill any desire to continue development. Is it more important for you, as a consumer, to be part of a collective of consumers, or would you like to engage in a constructive dialogue with the creators? Because that's what reviews can be. Despite what some grumpy fictional swamp goblin might say, there is no do, there is only trying and occasionally succeeding. Though Abermore has some clear misses, with a little more trying, I for one believe it can hit the right spot. If you did give it a chance and truly found no redeeming qualities hidden within, I can understand, but luckily there are so many other games to play. I love Abermore. Sometimes it does things that I hate, sometimes it aggravates and disappoints, but it has a raw flawed beauty that I truly adore. I cannot, in good faith, recommend it to just anyone out there, but I do think, if you're here, reading this, that you should give it a try. Try to see past its ugliness. Try to appreciate the writing, notwithstanding the occasional misspellings. Try to be kind. Because for all its faults, I can't stand seeing a game like this get nothing but hate.

I wish that I could recommend this game. It has some really interesting idea, which I would have loved to get deeper into, but it is absolutely riddled with irritating and immersion-breaking bugs, to the point where it is essentially unplayable In the first hour, I experienced bugs with the UI, level generation, achievements, the inventory, and held items disappearing/becoming unusable. And if you need to restart the game to fix a bug, you lose all progress on your current mission, as the only method of saving the game is an autosave at the beginning of each day (which the game doesn't warn you about when you try to quit) Possibly the worst part of all is that these bugs are so obvious, and seemingly so frequent, that there's no way the developers weren't aware of them, yet they chose to release the game in this state anyway, and to charge people for the privilege of figuring out just how broken it is.

Awesome idea, concept, and environment. So what went wrong? The game is unfinished. No description on what equipment actually does, buggy as all hell. Failed my first mission because my mission objective didn't spawn in. Really a shame the game seems like it would be awesome. I would say to hold out for it however I saw in a discussion post that the devs are actually abandoning the project. One of the members of the small dev team tweeted that they all went their separate ways so unfortunately this game will never be the gem that it could have been

This game is for freaks only. Are you a Thief freak? Someone who will play anything that even remotely resembles the Thief games? If you said yes then this game is for you. Otherwise you might just get angry. Abermore has personality. Like the climbing system that I haven't come across anywhere else. Or the Gutter and its inhabitants, I just love the game's random NPC generator's tendency to create the most hipster looking individuals. All the environments are quite charming. The writing is generally nice and at times really good! A definite highlight of the whole game. The small nuggets of story and worldbuilding paint a picture of a magic realist place. It's clear the developers love immersive sims and their worlds. I had to download a Unity debug tool so I could access the game's files on runtime and save myself from situations that were game breaking. I had to rely on this tool more than once. Actually pretty often. This would be my recommended way of experiencing the game. It is not the way games should be played I know, but as someone who makes games I had fun exploring the files and seeing how I can untangle the mess the game world was in. Now if that is not immersive simulation I don't know what is! Abermore has its own style, a thing I think should not be taken as granted. The developers had a vision and that shows. Making video games is hard and making immersive sims is even harder. So I applaud the devs for making one and giving us a glimpse of a world with personality and quirkiness.

Initially, I wasn't planning on going too hard on this game and its developers. But after spending few hours trying to figure out performance issues that this game has and figuring out the source of the softlock in the tutorial level (which I have informed the developer about) and then spending good few hours playing the game trying to see how many other issues are in this game and if there is a chance it is ever getting patched, I have come decided otherwise. So here goes... THIS GAME IS NOT RELEASE READY! IT IS NOT EVEN EARLY ACCESS READY! And to pretend it otherwise is absurd! Furthermore, I highly doubt there was any QA done by the publisher - if there was, someone would have caught the softlock issue in the tutorial. It is literally in the first 10 min of the game. It's not even something that is easily missed in test environments (like improper character coding in system paths for example is). All you need is one person from a region, which uses a comma as a decimal separator and you have your softlock and there are loads of them (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Countries_using_decimal_comma). No - there just wasn't QA done, and all we're dealing with is an attempt to pass a game that would barely classify as an alpha build as a full release, in a sickening attempt to recoup some losses by either a publisher, developer or both. Again, I was originally planning on not being too harsh, but ultimately, after seeing the state this game is in, the abysmal performance and that is with the ridiculous hacks that developers have implemented (like disabling shadow casting for almost all surfaces and setting a far plane for the camera to distance of something less than 100m), I just can't, cause at the end of the day, I am a game developer myself, I work with Unity and because of games like this I then have to deal with people constantly nagging "why Unity when you could use X,Y,Z", while in reality Unity - in the right hands - is perfectly capable of handling a game like this and much more. Essentially because of games like this, my professional life gets harder and I have to put even more effort into what I do, to convince people that now have a biased against games using Unity, that the choice of Unity as the core of the project wasn't the wrong one. Right. Haven't even managed to get to what this game essentially is and what it is, is a stealth game with some randomization (call it rouge-lite if you must). Problem is, the entire level generator is a gigantic mess that is unlikely to ever get fixed (and that is even if additional months of development get magically funded), as it is simply incapable of doing even basic stuff like connecting floors with one another without bugging out in a way that it leaves a gigantic hole in geometry in the place where the wall is supposed to be or putting a tiny room out of nowhere in the middle of the staircase with only inside faces of that room being present. It's a miracle if it even manages to spawn required objectives, as I had cases where I was supposed to disable X security systems and then the moment I loaded, it turned out that objective said 0 out of 0. I have had cameras spawn above the ceiling, ceilings spawning below where they should be and lacking collisions, I have had rooms without walls or doors on one of the ends that just lead into the void, where there wasn't any level anymore. I have had failed connections between rooms. I have had flowers being planted outside the ground, objects floating in mid-air and I literally NEVER had a single level that was generated as intended. It's just one gigantic mess and from the looks of it - it is never getting fixed and you should certainly NOT buy it in hopes it gets fixed one day - cause the likelihood of that happening is almost zero. Oh, and as for fixing the softlock, since I got no response being nicely ignored and there doesn't seem to be any movement on even the developer's branch, here is how much code has to be added to have that fixed, so if it doesn't get fixed soon - you might as well call this a scam project: [code]CultureInfo EnforcedCulture = new CultureInfo("en-GB"); CultureInfo.CurrentCulture = EnforcedCulture; CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture = EnforcedCulture;[/code] This should be executed once at the start-up of the program. Good day! -- EDIT -- Patch has dropped, sadly despite the notes saying a softlock in tutorial was removed - the softlock is still a thing.