Pestis Reviews

THIS GAME IS A SCAM NOW! Absolute Garbage for the Price. Basically all good reviews were from when this game was a literal Dollar. For which it was still pretty bad. Now they try to rip you off for 25 bucks.

I considered leaving a positive review because it's a unique little game, but I now see it's listed at $25 lol. It's very tedious, easy, and short, and it has no volume slider.

This game is pretty much a scam. When it came out in 2018 it was priced at 1€ or something like that, now it's priced at 25€. The game is by no means worth more than a buck. What you get is basically a small 20 minute long gameplay loop of walking from a to b and pressing e. You collect plants with different colors and use those to cure people, while trying to not get infected. That being said, I actually had some fun with the game itself, it was an entertaining hour trying to get all achievements, but that might just be cause I really love plague doctors. If you own it already, it's not hard to get all achievements. Otherwise, not worth it.

[b] Pestis [/b] would be a decent high-score game if it had leaderboards and more maps. Right now it has 1 map and 6 relatively easy achievements, hardly any reason to play it for more than 30 minutes. I think the artwork and animation are decent for what it is. You play as a plague doctor that is trying to cure a small village, and the game certainly captures that sinister atmosphere. The gameplay incorporates the potion mixing mechanic, although the system is very basic. There is some potential for improving your resource management, but without leaderboards I don't see the appeal. I think if the developer can add at least 2 more locations it would be serviceable (urban area and catacombs perhaps?). It has a partial support for controller despite not being listed on the store page. My F310 works fine, but you can't rebind it from default state. [h1] Pros: [/h1] + looks okey for the price + nice atmosphere + incorporates some "resource" management [h1] Cons: [/h1] - can't rebind controls - 1 map - no leaderboards - not enough achievements - could use more character models [b] Overall Thoughts 4/10 [/b] I probably would enjoy this game if it had a better sense of purpose. The high-score format really needs leaderboards or more achievements to grind. Otherwise, I feel like I am not accomplishing anything. For such a low price it looks serviceable, and the gameplay is somewhat entertaining. I do like the concept though. [code]Review By: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]

A fun little game with a good atmosphere. Not so sure about the full price but on sale it's absolutely wort it in my opinion. It's a pretty simple game of harvesting herbs to make potions and using them to destroy rat dens and cure villagers. you click on a villager, stab them in the neck, and choose the potions to match their lymphs. it's a colour matching and rat killing game, basically, and it's pretty fun. there are mushrooms to heal and cure you if you get sick, so as long as you keep track of where they are it's pretty easy, you can basically play as long as you want to. Still the art style and overall aesthetic are really good, and the music, while repetitive with only 2 tracks, is pretty good. It's as bleak and miserable as a game about the plague should be in all the right places, and fun in terms of game-play. an easy 100% achievement game too, for the people who care about that sort of thing.

Strategy, Simulation, and Time-Management are the three genres I'd label this as. It's really low budget and there are a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. There isn't a whole lot of a challenge here, but it is amusing. You do feel like you're rushed as people start dropping dead at least 5-10 minutes into each round. Once that kicks off, it's like trying to stop the chain-effect of a domino line. But after a try or two, it begins to make sense what the strategy is to juggling the few obstacles it throws at you. For the $0.49 cents I paid for it, I had a decent time. Fun enough to keep me playing a few rounds. I do wish it had more content, at least a few additional levels or challenges. It feels pretty empty because of that. What gameplay exists is pretty decent. Nothing spectacular but for a small, super low-budget release - sure, why not. Definitely not worth a full $2, tho. It does feel like it was a college or intro-level game project. Maybe that's too offensive, but it feels shallow and short.

Pestis is a boring, repetitive game, where you follow the very limited set of actions over and over again. It is also poorly drawn and animated, so there is no immersive atmosphere. There is also no plot, characters, lore, etc. The game could be saved by some sort of a great idea, unique features, as it was, for example, with Papers, Please, but this is, unfortunately, not the case.

There's a reasonable idea for a mediocre time waster in here, but it's lacking in so many ways that it doesn't even rise up to what I could call average quality. --- A couple things out of the way first: It's poorly translated. I don't actually hold that against it, but if that bothers you it's going to be one more fail on top of many. The controls can't be remapped on keyboard (no mouse is used) which since they aren't super complex didn't bother me, but it will bother some people and is worth noting if you have issues with the standard WASD movement. If you use a controller it's not really an issue. At its core it's a pretty simple time-management test: can you destroy a bunch of rats nests before all the villagers die from the plague. Your interactions with the world are straight forward: kill rats, cure villagers, burn rat holes and bodies to stop the plague from spreading, do this for as long as you can without being infected yourself which can lead to your own death. All of that would be fine but… 1) There's literally just one small village/map. You'll have seen the entire game in the span of about 10 minutes. (Honestly you'll have seen the entire game in less than 2 minutes, then you'll spend 10 minutes walking around seeing the exact same people, rats and buildings copy & pasted until you reach the other end of the village 10 minutes later). If you've looked at the screenshots on the store page, you've actually seen the entire game. It's less content than your average free flash game. 2) The controls are terrible in several ways. -First of all, your interaction with the world is almost entirely on one button. That button is used for killing rats, picking up plants, curing plague victims, burning corpses, burning rat holes. Better hope you aren't near more than one thing so the game can figure out what it is you actually wanted to interact with, otherwise it's just a random guess which action will activate. -Second off, your actions are super, incredibly slow. Push the button and… wait for what feels like forever to actually do anything. You can aim at a rat and to kill it all you have to do is touch it, but they will have walked slowly away (not even running) before you finish the animation to touch it and kill it. This bleeds over into everything you do. Pick a plant? Wait. Burn a corpse/rathole? Wait. Eat a mushroom to heal? Wait. Yea I know, hearing that out of context probably makes you think: shouldn't everything have an animation and time to complete? Sure, but these are way too long and it's literal your only interaction with the game that you have to do constantly. Once you understand how to play you spend all of your time waiting for animations without any actual interesting interactions since you've long since solved what needs to happen, the rest is waiting. In a game this incredibly small and short… they somehow made it feel slow and long in the worst possible way by making your interactions with it painfully slow. 3) Hit boxes are terrible and unpredictable. Touching rats to pop them is one of the games main interactions. Walk up, aim, interact and wait for your painfully slow arm to move up and point at them, poof, dead rat. Well, it should be unless the game decides you just didn't touch them on the correct pixel, try again and wait for that animation and hope they didn't just walk away this time while you wait some more. Even more strange is that sometimes the hit boxes work without you actually hitting them, I've had rats walk through me and die while they are behind me while my arm is out touching the other direction. While other times my hand/arm is covering the entire rat and it doesn't die, something about the tip of your finger being near the edge of their outline makes it a miss. It's just infuriatingly poor hit boxes that further compounds the slow as frick animation issues. 4) The game is just really poorly balanced. You need to collect various color plants for cures, but the predominant color you need is red as it's used for burning rat holes and dead bodies in addition to the regular cure mixes. There's not nearly enough red in the village. And since as noted this is a static village, yes I know where all of it is and yes it does respawn, but it's a bunch of waiting compared to just walking around gathering enough of the other colors. 5) The entire cure/heal yourself design is obnoxious. You spend most of the game gathering color plants to make cure potions or burn potions, but additionally there's mushrooms for curing yourself from plague or healing your health. Why can't you gather those like the other plants? You have to wait until you are injured to collect any. Or worse, you only slowly get infected with plague, but you can't begin curing the infection until you are fully infected… but then it takes many green mushrooms to cure. Why couldn't I be curing it as I go to prevent being fully infected? 6) The plague is predictable until it isn't. Most of the time the plague is transmitted by clouds either from the rats or coughing victims, then when one dies it can release sentient swarms that sometimes follow you like a smart missile. Stranger still is that normally you get sick and your life goes down slow, you have a bit of time to cure your sickness then gather red mushrooms and heal back your health. Then other times you'll get sick and just fall over dead even if you were full health without any time to cure yourself. It's almost like the game just decides it feels like winning at some point and just kills you. 7) If the slow animations and poor design issues weren't enough, the game is also glitchy. I've several times cured a villager and then had them just fall over dead while I'm walking away. Like the game just forgot I cured them. 8) Even the achievements appear to be glitched. For example I just earned the "Cure over 15 villagers and still be alive" achievement, which in theory is the final achievement in the game. But it didn't bother to give me the achievements leading up to that (cure 5, cure between 5 and 10, cure between 10 and 15). In other words I have to play again and cure only the exact amount of villagers before killing myself (when I've already cured more than was required or I wouldn't have the cure 15 achievement). Basically the game appears to only give you the highest total cure achievement you earned in a particular play through, because it's not awarded until you die and it only counts the highest total not the ones leading up to it. I ended up replaying the stupid thing to finish out the achievements, but there's not enough content or quality here for me to actually recommend anyone else waste their time with this. --- Bottom line: Even at this price it's a terrible game. --- [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38232109/]While you are here, would you consider following my curator page?[/url] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/kunovega/recommended/]Want to read all of my reviews and not just the curated ones?[/url]

An intriguing premise in search of a more substantial game. That said: what IS here is at least worth a look. The mechanics are minimal, yet engaging enough once you get the hang of them: collect plants to make potions, crush plague-ridden rats with your foot, destroy plague-ridden rat holes with fire, and cure plague-ridden people with home-made antidotes. It might seem like a lot of buttons at first - all with the left hand, just to guarantee w*nker's cramp - but it's sufficiently straightforward, given time. Emphasis on straightforward: NOT easy. I haven't managed to survive a single plague yet, but I'm slowly getting there. I think. Is it worth two bucks? Sure, absolutely. There's only one map, and the gameplay is pretty repetitive; but getting all the Achievements should take a while, especially if you're as crap at this kind of quasi-strategy/management game as I am. Only the most kickass of players will 100% the "cheevos" in less than a couple of hours. So the value is definitely there. It also boasts a suitably dank-'n'-dirty atmosphere, helped in no small part by an aptly Dead Can Dance-esque soundtrack. Overall, it's a pretty nice package for such a small price, and I see the developer has some other intriguing-looking games in their oeuvre, so there's certainly a desire to do something different here. Just don't expect something with the depth of, say, a Plants vs. Zombies, and you may well get a few entertaining hours out of this one. Verdict: 7.5/10. (PS If you enjoyed this review, feel free to check out my two Curator pages: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9284586-ReviewsJustfortheHELLofit/ http://store.steampowered.com/curator/10868048-Truly-Horrible-Horror-Games/?appid=398210 Cheers!)

Interesting game idea. The herbs are stolen from Resident Evil Green, Red, Blue? SURE ;) but not bad game, but it feel a bit unfinshed only 1 tutorial & 1 level & you never can rescue all :( For low prices for achievement hunters okay