Olav: the story of one boy Reviews

Just another RPG game that you should probably avoid.

RPG Maker strikes again! "Olav: the story of one boy" is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. Notably the developer here couldn't work out how to use RPG Maker to make an RPG... and that's the only thing RPG Maker can do properly... except it's not even very good for making RPGs. Instead, we have a really crap "interactive novel" E-book, translated badly from Russian, accompanying all the stock RPG Maker assets the developer ripped off to make this cash grab shovelware. This is pure garbage. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. 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 no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. "Olav: the story of one boy" is relatively cheap at $1 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. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.

Great soundtrack. Interesting use of RPG maker. Walking simulator/Visual Novel style game. There is an interesting story buried under the poor translations. Giving it a thumbs up for the fun I had. Great stuff! https://youtu.be/pZPSbuXS3XY

The Story is alright, sort of boring but its fine, i guess. What really bothers me though, is the really really bad english, like people already said its bad, but its worse than you actually think it is. I mean if you dont believe me when i tell you how bad it is, just go and read the description yourself. The Game is fine though, i would give it a 4/10. And to the Developer if you are reading this, hire or get a friend to fix the lines for you, and patch the game if you can, because the game at its current state is sort of unbearable and sort of hard to understand and enjoy.

Olav: The Story of One Boy is a visual novel/walking simulator that shares a similar aesthetic and game-play of "To the Moon" (a game that I love). The title is executed quite poorly. There is no interactivity other than walking through corridors and rooms where you cannot interact with anything. There is no reason to explore the few areas available. Most of the doors do not even open. In open areas there are invisible walls to stop you in any direction. There are no NPC to talk with, nor objects to interact. A video would do a better job. The game is incredibly short, only lasting about 20 minutes. The story is a continuous series of dramas, and the only message seems to be that Olav is incredibly unlucky. There is not even an ending or a conclusion. Just a sad man, that's it. The characters and dialogues lack depth, and the English translation appears to be done by Google Translate, making it occasionally incomprehensible. Useless parameters such as level, HP, MP are in the menu. Moreover, the game has a significant bug: where entering the bathroom on the right side of the school will teleport you to your apartment, making it impossible to continue the story. Overall, "Olav: The Story of One Boy" is a poorly executed game that does not offer any significant interactive gameplay or deep storytelling. Luckily it's too short to become frustrating. Therefore, I cannot recommend this game to anyone.