Slime-san: Blackbird's Kraken Reviews

Note: This review may look like it's been copy + pasted from my review for Slime-san: Sheeple's Sequel... that's because this entire game is copy + pasted from that one. It does no service to gamers when developers just copy + paste entire games to try get paid twice for what's basically the same game, same assets, same gameplay... ugh. Slime-san: Blackbirds Kraken is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This is in many ways a ripoff of Super Meat Boy, except your slime trail is green instead of red. Truly amazing innovation here... ugh. It's a "Frustration" platformer, made extra difficult on purpose, because retrying levels all the time means the developer didn't have to make a lot of levels, and that would involve hard work, so they didn't do it. Just like real graphics require hard work, so this has pixelcrap "art" instead. See the pattern here? 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. To make matters worse, while lazy, low quality pixel "art" has been used, making the game look bad, many elements of the game aren't done with pixelcrap... which accomplishes a couple of things. First, it shows the developers perhaps could have done better and they knew it, so that's a major screwup. Secondly, it destroys any hopes the developer had of creating a "retro aesthetic" as their excuse for the lazy pixelart compromise... It looks completely inauthentic from a retro gaming perspective. Visually, this is a hamfisted mess, a dogs breakfast of bad visuals, and this kind of laziness and poor quality should never be foisted on gamers. 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. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Slime-san: Blackbirds Kraken didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for beating the core levels, trivial to get, but less than 16 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Slime-san: Blackbirds Kraken has the far too high price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

lol, very nice game, but quite difficult.

Solid platformer, the content of this is included in the main game, i just wanted to support the dev by buying and finishing it again