The Adventurer and His Backpack Reviews

"The Adventurer and His Backpack" is a very poorly made, well, my instinct is to call this a browser game because it might as well have been done in HTML. It's a simple menu clicker... imagine an RPG with all the interaction removed, just encounters popping up in front of you in a window. Less going on here than a 1980's console JRPG. It's barely a game! So all you do here is just plug away at RPG stats and a bit of drag and drop inventory management. No moving around or anything... movement is just too complicated for game development in 2017! So this is a very bland barebones RPG system without a game on top of it. Worth avoiding. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The controls can't be customised because the game doesn't really have any interface beyond menus and simple UI controls no different from dialog boxes in Windows Explorer. If you think about it, this barely counts as an "interactive" game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play fully immersive games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page or a mobile app. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. 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, 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. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? "The Adventurer and His Backpack" 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.