Twilight on Yulestead Reviews

"Twilight on Yulestead" is a very badly made first person adventure puzzle game that looks a lot like a weeekend project or some kind of student assignment rather than a professionally developed game. At least it's not an asset flip, and we know that because the game assets look terrible. At least there's some sincerity. All you do in this game is move around, "talk" to people, move boxes around... it's clunky, it looks bad, it plays worse. The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. 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 features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with. While not necessarily a deal breaker, the game does lack polish and a few elements are a little clunky/unsmooth, this is still rough around the edges. There's also some reports of bugs which may result in a negative user experience. Your mileage may vary on this. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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? "Twilight on Yulestead" is relatively cheap at $2 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 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Edit: I was angry after playing this game because it was so bad, resulting in an aggressive review. Now, a day later, i calmed down and changed a few sentences. My opinion didn't change though: This game is terrible and way overpriced. Let's go through it step by step. No options menu. You can neither change mouse sensitivity, nor resolution, nor the volume of music and sounds. When i loaded into the game, the camera was spinning around in circles. I had to disconnect all controllers and restart the game (going back to the main menu and starting again didn't help) to make it even work. And you cannot look down or up all the way. It seems the character has a stiff neck or some other kind of disability. In addition, the turquoise dot that is supposed to be the cross-hair sometimes moves along with the mouse movement. And when you press the action/interact button, you interact with the object the cross-hair is pointing on, not with the object in the middle of the screen. The visuals are awful. There is basically no lighting, all assets, including the walls, are self-illuminating - with the exception of the walls in one "dungeon". The town is lit and objects outside still throw shadows, but without a visible light source, and most objects look like they were placed randomly. The characters are nightmare creatures. They look like they escaped the drawings of a 6-year-old child, and the animations are just as bad. At least enemies have decent pathfinding. The hitboxes are an issue, too. You can look down enough to see that there is 0.5 yards or even one yard empty space between you and an object and you cannot move closer to it. Speaking of boxes, moving boxes are a big part of this game - if only you could pick them up. No, you have to push them around by running into them, which is very clunky and frustrating. You can do it with your "weapon", too, which seems like it's supposed to be a magic staff shooting magic balls, but you are limited by a very slowly regenerating mana pool. One character asked me to bring her a light crate. And for that, she allowed me to enter her home. That is completly implausible. I mean, it's supposed to be an RPG, right? So, what is that character's motivation to allow the cleric to enter her house? And if it's because "he's the trusted town cleric" - why wasn't he allowed to enter her house before? In addition, why does that trusted town cleric steal the silver cutlery in her house (which was lying on the floor and weirdly "hidden" behind some crates, yeah, that's totally where everyone whould store their silver cutlery, right)? An other character lost the keys to his house. If you find them, he'll also let you go in without any hesitation and take whatever you want. One of the most important thing of an RPG is having believable characters. Sadly, the characters in this game are the opposite. It's not only the characters that make no sense. The entire architecture of the village and the houses are also implausible. The houses are way bigger from the inside, and for some reason, people like to put a lot of crates into their houses, placed at weird positions. But a place to eat or to cook is missing everywhere. And btw, the developer loves labyrinths. 80% of the time i spent playing this game, i was in a labyrinth, and each labyrinth is bigger than the entire town. Do you know even one good game with labyrinths in it? I don't. And there is a reason for that. First off, they are extremly easy to do. I drew labyrinths when i was at school. And secondly, it's extremly boring to navigate through them in a game because you see the same textures and objects without much variety for quite some time. And this is the main content of this game. Twilight on Yulestead has a story, but there wasn't much thought put into it. Apparently you play as a character who has knowledge about an artifact, and that character and his town were cursed because he didn't want to hand it over to some powerful countess. But you, as a player, don't have the knowledge how to get that artifact, so you, playing the cleric with the knowledge, have to get that information from a random NPC. What? Player guidance and story telling is basically non-existant, the whole plot it told with a message on the loading screen and one or two text boxes in the game. There are many more little things wrong with this game, but this review is very long already. Hopefully the developer will take some of this as feedback to improve themselves - a lot. I got the feeling that they are missing knowledge about the basics of game design. I'm even doubting that they have played many games themselves. Or they did and lack the skill of analyzing why other games work out. Sadly, i don't think you can improve this game enough to make it even worth two dollars. If it was just 50 cent, i wouldn't have cared. But for 10$, i had to request a refund.