Juno's Darkest Hour Reviews

Juno's Darkest Hour is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This is a particularly poorly made platformer. I hope it's trying to emulate a Gameboy (if so, this is a terrible idea and a good explanation for why the game was such a dismal failure), because if not, it's just awfully made for no clear reason at all. Then again, we're deep in the shovelware section of the Steam store, so anything is possible. All you do in this platformer is do some precision platforming, collect stuff, don't let the baddies bump your heart containers to empty, etc etc. It's been done a thousand times or more, all better than this. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game only displays in a bizarre 1:1 aspect ratio. Like... do they own a completely square monitor? Has the developer never seen a computer before? This isn't really acceptable, and it's unclear why the developer couldn't format the game correctly. Another reason to avoid this. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Juno's Darkest Hour has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Hunger Slayer", collecting some food while already at full health, you can get this within 30 seconds of starting the game, trivial to achieve, but less than 3 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? Juno's Darkest Hour is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.