I played Steam's Top 10 Worst Reviewed Metroidvanias... it was painful.
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- Опубликовано: 22 май 2024
- Today, I'm forcing myself to play each of the top 10 lowest reviewed metroidvanias on Steam for thirty minutes each... and then giving my thoughts! Overall, it was exhausting and painful, but still had really fun moments too. Shoutouts to @PyeFive for the awesome video edit!
Thumbnail format inspired by @IronPineapple
▶ FOLLOW
Stream: / fireb0rn
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Discord: / discord
Twitter: / fireb0rn
Instagram: / fireb0rngg
▶ MUSIC
Hollow Knight - Hive Knight
999 - Binary Game
Donkey Kong Country - Treetop Rock
999 - Ternary Game
Sonic Unleashed - Jungle Joyride
999 - Digital Root
Super Mario 64 - Cave Dungeon
OneShot - Someplace I Know
Sonic 06 - Aquatic Base (Level 1)
Undertale - Another Medium
Sonic Colors - Planet Wisp (Act 2)
Knuckles' Chaotix - Seascape
▶ CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
0:20 Number 10. Exodus
3:56 Number 9. Curse of the Sea Rats
6:05 Number 8. Paradox Soul
8:40 Number 7. Yeomna: The Legend of Dongbaek
11:54 Number 6. Dark Matter
15:05 Number 5. Humanity Asset
17:51 Number 4. Nihilsearch
20:42 Number 3. Inescapable
22:41 Number 2. Red Goddess: Inner World
26:45 Number 1. Micetopia
29:28 Conclusion
30:22 Pantheon of God Gamers
#metroidvania #awfulgaming #challenge 
Игры
It's a pity that Curse of the Sea Rats, Yeomna, and Micetopoia all look so good and play so poorly.
Yeah I was hyped for Curse of the Sea Rats for a good while, then was heartbroken when I saw the reviews. Unfortunately they seem justified too...
Right?? This video just made me kind of sad because the bare bones of the games were there, they just needed a little help and play testing to make them good games. The art for Sea Rats and Yeomna was great as well and the lore/stories for each looked solid.
there may not have been QA during development, i remember that when the first monster hunter released on the PS2, it sold poorly in the west because of the clunky controls, and that was because one of the developers played with a special build for those controls and played very well, so they shipped with that.
a similar thing happened with the game Alien Resurrection, once released people complained of the game being too hard, and it wad revealed in an interview that the QA team played it so much that they were beating the game speedrun levels with just the pistol, so the devs made it harder thinking the game to be too easy and that may cause issues with the engagement between the game and the player, which was not the case
QA is an important part of development, but there must be communication so a medium is estabilished
@@Paratroopersteark yeah, if the game feels too easy it's better if hardening is left to the community (HolloKnight boss mods I'm looking at you)
@@Paratroopersteark I've done this in game jams. In my most recent one I was getting through a level so fast that it would end up soft locking the game, so I made a wall jump section one tile wider to slow down the player a bit. It solved the problem... for me. When it released it turned out that everyone else found the level almost impossible.
Just imagine how many hours the guy who voiced the narrator in Red Goddess spent recording, only for them to fail at audio mixing and outright tell the player not to listen to him. Brutal.
Perhaps the leading developer of the Red Goddess put someone whom he didn't like to voice the Narrator as a middle-finger?
What's the opposite of "don't shoot the messeger"? Because they definitively should shoot this one.
Voice actor generally work for a paycheck and not recognition. I imagine he doesn't care much as long as the check cleared.
...It's a game with an unreliable narrator, I'm pretty sure he knew what he was getting into when he signed up. They didn't just inexplicably decide to screw him over, it's a common narrative trope.
@@naplockblubba5369 A well done unreliable narrator is one that is not overtly obvious that they are unreliable. It's a trope that only works if you come to distrust the narrator, not if you distrust them outright.
My greatest fear as a game developer wanting to make small indie projects is ending up in one of these types of videos LOL
An effective metric is playing the game and enjoying it yourself. If at any point your drive to continue is "it gets better later" then you already have a problem.
@@rompevuevitos222 That and get a couple friends to play the game, too, because you're already used to your own game and are either too good at it from repeated testing or are completely bored of all the levels for the same reason. And if you have to make changes, get those friends to play it again, but also get new players on it, too, so you still have fresh eyes looking at it. As a final test, try speedrunning your game to see if anything annoying crops up. This isn't to cater your game to speedrunners, though. It's for impatient players, particularly those who might die a bunch and redo the same parts over and over. What might feel like a reasonable wait time at first might be agonizing the fourth or fifth time through, but skip buttons and thoughtfully placed checkpoints can go a long way towards mitigating that. For instance, if you're not sure if your checkpoint is the right distance from a boss, err on the side of too close, because it's better to sacrifice difficulty to avoid making your game annoying, and ideally any long pre-boss cutscene should have a checkpoint right before the fight starts. That said, long runs to retry a fight are sometimes an intended part of the game's difficulty, so use your best judgement to make it fit your vision for your game.
I assure you if you have any knowledge on game design you already make games way better than most of the ones here lol
Same !
lmao, same
If I had a nickel for every rodent themed game in the top ten worst reviewed metroidvanias, I'd have two nickels. I'm lazy and you all know the punchline.
Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?
@@chordalharmony lol you butchered the line
@@itoaste I fixed it
it's not a lot, but it's weird that it happened mice
@@chordalharmony nice
We need to find whoever did the art for Curse of the Sea Rats and Yeomna and get them to work on an actual game.
Also, it's kinda weirdly specific how two out of these ten involve anthropomorphic rodents.
Rat-roidvania
The whole reason that curse of the sea rats failed so spectacularly was because they focused the entire development on the artwork and voice acting at the expense of everything else.
@@Zincoshine- the team clearly wanted to make a cartoon more than a game.
@@FizzieWebb This feels a little uncharitable? I went and looked and it seems like almost everything else they've done has been little kid stuff--it makes sense to me both why they'd want to make a real game with an older audience than Peppa Pig, and why that'd be a big challenge.
@@Zincoshine- this isn't how game development works lmao
The « ZQSD » controls of exodus is because in France (and probably a lot of other countries) it’s the default controls. That’s because keyboard are in AZERTY form instead of QWERTY form
its a crime to have keyboard letters in alphabetical order
@@theultimatetrashman887 That's not alphabetical order.
@theultimatetrashman887 kxlosgzcsn
(That's 'absolutely' but typed as if the keyboard was in alphabetical order. That took me 10 minutes and I probably messed up
Edit: it's actually qwlishecsf. I have no idea how tired I was to mess up that badly...
@@theultimatetrashman887 Sir have you seen what the alphabet looks like
i figured it was something like that especially combined with the poorly translated dialogue
As a pixel artist himself, I am actually very impressed by the spritework from Micetopia. A lot of the sprites clearly use a small aspect ratio, but they look very colorful and detailed. Even if the game itself isn't the greatest, whoever did the art deserves to be commended.
So I read this comment and decided to look up the artist only to realise that my quest was futile and doomed to fail. Ive been searching for a good 15-20 minutes at this point and theres nothing, anywhere, at all. Im pretty sure im going mad at this point.
Could anyone who owns the game look it up in the credits maybe because not even those are available online afaik ,_,
- a despairing freelance artist with weird hyperfixations
@@katzenhai8289 I wonder if they bought an asset pack or something. The fires and the portal are of very low quality and clearly just severely threshold-filtered regular footage. However, everything else looks fairly cohesive.
@@katzenhai8289 it seems like everything about that game was made by one dude and it was the first project that they've ever published. If it wasn't an art pack that they found or commissioned then I would think that this was just a passion project with art that they made themselves. You could probably find the artist by looking at who published the game on steam.
It definitely feels like a project made by somebody who had artistic talent and wanted to make it a game. The best indie games are those that start with the question "Wouldn't it be cool if I could do ___?" rather than "Wouldn't it be cool if I could see blank?"
I know right? The pixel art isn’t bad. It’s just lacking in the variety department. I really hope the creator doesn’t stop here and decides to try making a game again because they have some talent.
@@mariothane8754 Same, they seem like they could really hone their craft if they put their mind to it.
"Micetopia may be the best game in the entire TOP 10"
That's a quote they are gonna be putting on their store page.
With absolutely no context, of course.
An evil narrator is a really cool idea, but is should definitely be a twist, not told to you immediately.
Like Little Misfortune!
Dungeons 3 played on this. The narrator is an actual character you interact with, and will make things easier or harder based on how he is treated by the NPC's.
And in one of the DLC's, he escapes the game and you have to go get him back as he kidnaps the devs and has them change the game rules.
Icey kinda did this although it was more like if you ignore the narrator they have a nervous breakdown and start crying.
or make the narrator fight back. make you struggle to believe if the narrator or your companion is telling the truth. and then seed the game with hints that make it hard to decide until it's revealed who the evil narrator is and that they truly were untrustworthy.
but that requires the ability to write nuanced and complex dialog.
pit people had a evil narrator in the form of the giant space bear named honey kiss
It is a shame that some very competent animation was wasted on some very boring games.
was thinking the same, allot of these actually looked beautifull but were wasted because of incompetent programmers / designers
@@anormalguy8407 people tend to think that game designers are useless and stuff, and that's how you end up with games with a terrible gameplay loop
I was here for most of this! I remember all of us thinking Curse of the Sea Rats was so bad and then realizing that, compared to the other ones, we had it so good. And it was so weird seeing that Micetopia was the worst reviewed when there were genuinely much worse ones on the list???
Probably due to the low review count. The less reviews a game has, the less accurate the combined score is.
As he said in the video, it's just the raw %. So a game with only 13 reviews and 10 negative that gets 1 additional bad review will go from 76.9% negative to 78.6% negative. A single review is dramatically changing the %, compared to a game with tens of thousands of reviews where it will (and should) take ~500 people to effect the rating by 1%, for Micetopia a *SINGLE PERSON* can effect the rating by 2% instead.
Is because only 14 people reviewed and that makes the negative percentage way higher.
Makes me sad when a decent game (or not TOTAL GARBAGE in this case) has so few reviews. Because it means they barely sold any copies. And thus likely lost a shit ton of money making the game. Magbot is great but barely sold.
It's also probably because there's no "meh" option on Steam. Game looks "meh", not horrendous, but you can only give a negative review in that case.
Micetopia has a very "yeah give the developers a few more tries, but this ain't it" vibe.
Really disappointing to hear Curse of the Sea Rats was that bad. That game had a ton of hype and some good looking trailers a few months ago.
yeah the animation looks incredible, its just a shame the gameplay isnt great
yeah same
I mean I'd smash the lady rat but is that really an important factor?
For real it was looking so good, but looking at various playthroughs and such, it's so basic in terms of gameplay I'm pretty sure a 10 year old (or or younger) could do it
Since it's a national game it got SO MUCH promotion in here, the shilling was kinda pathetic. Especially when actual promising games like Blasphemous 2 have gotten almost zero publicity.
This is so sad because all these games obviously had effort put behind them, it's just the developers were out of their depth, a common problem when developing a game
Yeah, a lot of these seem like artists trying to make a game and then realizing that "game design" is not the type of design that they're used to doing
@@Mewkityy Heck, that can even expand into different forms of the same field. I was once seeking to hire an artist to design a logo. One of the people who applied for the job was indeed a good artist, but his entire portfolio consisted of various characters. It presented no experience at drawing logos. When I turned him down because he didn't have proof of what I was looking for, I had to explain to him how just because a person can draw captivating characters, that doesn't mean they understand the logistics of a captivating logo; especially since I needed to hire somebody who could conceptualize the logo by their own expertise based on a written description of what I was chasing. And that I had to even bother explaining that those were two different artistic fields didn't exactly help instill me with confidence in him.
@@gurvmlk You can't just abstractly describe a logo and hope that an artist can magically whip you one up. Jeesh, sound's like you didn't even give him a chance. No artist is going to waste portfolio space on logos, So going off that alone was a mistake.
@@RedShirtGuy96 Except that every other applicant did provide logos in their portfolio. One of them even had a website dedicated to their logo and graphic design.
@@RedShirtGuy96 as an artist, yes they will. It's not like a portfolio is something that doesn't get adapted depending on the job that's being applied for.
There are way worse games on steam.
There was one game I played called ä where you just do very basic platforming and every time you die there is a photo of a dead body.
this made me laugh, that's awful omg
Another example is lone fungus which is much worse than micetopia
I played Lone Fungus.
It wasn't bad in my opinion. I enjoyed it for 2 hours and then never felt like playing it again. It just wasn't very interesting.@@mapron1
@@beri4138 Everything is hit on touch. Every platform filled with enemies like prickles in can. Reaching endgame and obtaining abilities don't make you feel stringer, as navigation feels same chore. after getting like 70% i switched to god mode because navigation is fucking terrible. I don't think I ever M-a worse in my life than lone fungus.
And even worse feeling that it looks like something with a great amount of work, but aimed to torture the player.
Micetopia just feels like a lazy game, withough much though, so it is more forgivable.
Do you mean like a real one?
Sounds like it was made by a mind alike the dev of HongKong97.
what a fun video! i can't wait til lotus knight sweeps these boards
pee
LOL YES 👍
The Narrator in Red Goddess would've been just fine as a framing device to make you feel like you're playing through some sort of folk tale. The fact that they tell you up front that he's unreliable instead having the player figure it out (either on their own or by leading you into a death trap or bad ending) is a problem, especially because in a sense this feels like it should've been a twist?
Yeah and given the fact that this was one of those "Kickstarter non-starters" as retsupurae riffed on years ago, it's clear the person making the game did that to be as amateur as possible. Like those cases where a movie writer thinks the key to making a great movie is to say the name of a popular character from another movie enough times that people think the popular character is in that movie but the movie has nothing to do with said popular character (I think some Jason Bourne spin off did that).
You got to love the classic hallmark of a dubious Kickstarter game of the Red Goddess project lead going "we might have never once developed a game before but that's what we are doing and its gonna be the best damn game to ever exist."
Yes, the arrogance and foolishness is palpable.
In fairness, a lot of indie games are exactly this: see Cuphead.
Yeah, I mean I get it. You gotta attract lots of people to help fund you. But niche genre games with limited scope almost always seem like they will be a little more successful than ones that promise everything and pander to a wide audience. It's a trade-off, really. Set expectations comfortably low, you might not get enough support. Set them too high, you'll get stomped into oblivion when you can't meet them
Isn't that Hollow Knight? Team Cherry had never developed a full game before, just a few game jams.
I was quite surprised and upset to see micetopia as the worst rated metroidvania on steam. I've played it on nintendo switch and honestly, for a 5 dollars game, the art style is really nice and I kinda liked it
Only $5? Then yeah, I definitely agree, doesn't deserve that low of a rating at all. I only think it was that low because so few people reviewed it.
@@opaltoralien4015 yup, small sample size messes with statistics a ton, it was definitely the best game on the list and something I would even potentially play
From what I've seen, I'm even more convinced to buy it.
it's a fun lil game. Doesn't make sense to rate it as the worst at all.
People don't rate games fairly. If they like it, they give it the highest possible score, and if they don't, they give it the lowest possible. There's no in between with the vast majority of people who rate games.
“Maybe I’m just coping from the trauma of playing these games for seven hours straight” Fire r u ok
He went mad waiting for silksong and has resorted to eating bad slop
now play the top 10 best reviewed metroidvanias
He probably already has LOL
@@ScrapeGoatt fr fr
the last game would just be hollow knight again but he does another 100% speedrun lol.
Hollow Knight, Ori, Ori again…
I mean it will be games we just heard before.
I think I know why you had instant regeneration in Humanity Asset. The game was lagging and not updating frequently enough, but the health was checking the time that has passed instead of how much the game has progressed in that time frame. Thus the health was regenerating as if the game was running at its normal speed.
That's kind of hilarious. XD Reminds me of DK 64's failsafe for lag being to increase the character's speed relative to the lag time, thus allowing lots of "Walk through walls" clips since it was so easy to lag the game. Given there's a regeneration system in the first place, it definitely had to be an unintended side effect.
reminds me of a game called "otherland" in a series of videos by "Josh Strife Hayes" that was sort of teh opposite:
Poison is supposed to do a few point of damage per SECOND, but instead it did damage EVERY FRAME OF ANIMATION, making it absurdly overpowered!
Some of them look artistically great ! That's really sad that they are not more successful :/
I feel like the recurring theme of these is "Amazing Art, Terrible Design". These are studios who really know their stuff and put a TON of work into all of these projects (except humanities asset and the gate one). But they don't know game design. They fell flat at the most important hurdle, making something that's actually fun to play.
There are so many studios, I feel, that do this. 15 artists and 1 programmer, none of which know what makes their games fun.
@@syeblaize *cough* Pokemon *cough*
Seriously, I think "15 artists and 1 programmer" perfectly describes GameFreak.
Pokémon should have been a set of stories if Scarlet/Violet is their peak after 2010.
@@syeblaize A.k.a. Tumblr
@@De_an pfff,have you seen the new games? They probably don't have any artists either!
The Micetopia health UI is amazingly cool though. The game deserves better than bottom 10 just from that alone.
Yeah could be a case of too few people heard of it. I was half expecting a "Why is this game rated so bad...oh...it was stolen...." plot twist, but seems it was just a case of the first 14 people to play it felt it was meh and not worth paying for. Like Amazon reviews, you always have to actuallly read the reviews. I've seen enough "lol, furry... don't recommend" reviews on steam to know people troll a lot. especially with smaller games. (but in fairness, 50% isn't the worst rating for a game. I've seen AAA titles get far worse ratings because of saturation and high expectations).
It's cool looking but it's extremely hard to tell how much health you have at a glance which is a problem for a game that should have fast-paced combat
0:20 *Exodus.* Looks fundamentally broken and unfinished. Feels more like a demo.
3:56 *Curse of the Sea Rats.* Loving its artstyle, and seemed interesting. But it sucks its gameplay is such unpolished. But i can see the potential here.
6:05 *Paradox Soul.* Looks cute enough, yet not enough to justify it's (lack of) content.
8:40 *Yeomna: The Legend of Dongbaek.* i adore its artstyle, reminds me of _Muramasa, The Demon Blade,_ but just as CotSR, it's completely wasted in poor gameplay.
11:54 *Dark Matter.* Another fundamentally broken game, another demo-esque game.
15:05 *Humanity Asset.* 11/10 besto gaem evr maed. Okay, jokes apart, of all fundamentally broken games on this list, this is the worst. Damn this is worst than a demo.
17:51 *Nihilsearch.* Kinda meh. Good yet not interesting artstyle, not as fundamentally broken as other games on this list, but damn it looks boring.
20:42 *Inescapable.* Same as Nihilsearch but doubled. Not worth any time.
22:41 *Red Goddess: Inner World.* Jesus Christ, there's so much to say here, you can see there's a direction and ambition on this game, but so much fundamental aspects got missed catastrophically. The biggest wasted potential on the list, by virtue there was people investing on this, people interested on what this could've been, yet they took so many bad decisions the final product it's just completely broken.
26:45 *Micetopia.* Okay this makes me sad, of all these games, this one is my actual fav. Not a big game trying to impress you, but a cute experience to spend some little free time you have. Loving the artstyle (what with rat games and great artstyle?), and seems functional enough, specially considering of all this list, it's the one that looks the most functional and actually playable of the bunch.
Yeah, of this list, i just got some degree of interest on Curse of the Sea Rats, Yeomna, and specially Micetopia. The rest are really not appealing at all, specially Humanity Asset and Red Goddess, both those are just criminal.
Rather than Dark Matter being demo-esque, it appears to legitmately be an unfinished game that was dumped onto Steam, and may even be a repackaged demo or beta. When the game was initially released, it didn't even have a real ending. As part of the post-release damage control, a developer account posted what was claimed to be a message from the CEO of Iceburg Interactive (the publisher of the game) claiming that the decision was made to turn Dark Matter into an episodic series after its Kickstarter campaign failed. When asked why the Store page never mentioned this, the reply tried to spin that it would have been "misleading" to call the released game 'Episode 1' as they didn't know if there would ever be an Episode 2...
The idea of a 'Load Stone' is a great pun, but it works better if your game actually loads decently fast.
"uses ZQSD instead WASD" - it's an AZERTY layout. Used mostly in France and Belgium, so you can guess where the devs are from.
Haiti?
i'm not proud of my country anymore lmao 🥖
I once worked for a small indie game developer company, and they sometimes used the concept of "coder graphics" referring to stand-in graphics quickly drawn by the developer (who has no drawing skills) until a graphics artist makes the actual graphics.
Well, now I know what a game developed by graphics artists would be like.
ZQSD definetly screams French!
The last "worst" game does look like the best one 😅
That's why I always actually Read the reviews than just look at the number.
Paradox Soul looks like a flash game I'd have enjoyed as a middle schooler, the kind made by someone just learning to code. Good concept! But not worth my money lol
Or a game jam submission
It's the exact gameplay from *Not A Hero* but with less character variety and no humor.
I miss those days, when someone trying to get into coding would release the flash games for free so they can get feedback.
It seems like this round of games is a lot less bad than in these videos for other genres. Metroidvania is a genre that the people intentionally making shovelware aren't going to attempt. The main failure mode for this genre is just biting off more than you can chew, so there's probably a lot of other ones that were attempted but never published.
I had the same thought, it's kind of a credit to the genre.
Love this. I would love to se a series of '10 metroidvanias you've never heard of.' It would have a similar vibe, with a chance to find some truly amazing hidden gems
Timespinner?
I wanted to say Bloodstained but then I remembered it's literally one of the most funded kickstarters of all time. Oops.
I'm sad about the Rat one. The animation and art looks so Darn Good in that game.
Curse has a lot of good art.
But even in thus trailer you can tell it had several good artists but lacked a strong art director. Feels like they made the game first then hired someone on Fiver to do the cutscene art. Then the realized they forgot to ask them to do the character select art and had to hire someone else. Rinse and repeat.
While there is nothing wrong with outsourcing stuff like that a strong art director will make the the different artist make something cohesive rather than jarring.
I strongly dislike games that sell you on box art/intro video but then the game isn't even close to the same quality.
I love how that applies to two games
I remember looking forward to Curse of the Sea Rats. Kind of a shame to see how it ended up, I'm pretty sure it's the most recent of those you showed here.
Yeah, that artwork is fantastic. Hard to say how bad the game as a whole is as it seems the guy only played the first few screens and it's just "Nintendo hard", so there's the very real possibily some of the negative reviews were just "Lol, furry game" stuff. Still, making really good games with great art is a challenge. As an animator hobbyist myself I know the animation takes up most of the months developing.
The ZQSD constrol scheme tells me that the devs aee french. Or at least use french azerty keyboards
I love how when I see the artwork for these I am like "Say that looks pretty good and that's a good concept!" then a few minutes later I am like "BRUH!! YOU DON'T DO THAT FOR A METROIDVANIA!"
Curse of the sea rat - You can heal by going to save point, like the one you just ran by to die to a crab because you couldn't be assed enough to figure out the block button.
they probably should have explained that so he would have known
if the game doesn't tell me there's a block button i'm probably going to assume there is no block button because my first instinct upon booting up a new game is not to rush to the keybindings menu to see all the moves
@@MBCollector672 it actually does do tutorial things. But it doesn't force you to go through 20 minutes of tutorials. For example, the moment he talks to the old man at the save point, it has a dialog box thing that opens up at the top that tells you that you can come to the save point to heal. Something the video guy failed to read, but after playing so many metroidvanias should have known to be likely. Because that is how it works in almost every metroidvania that has save points.
However I do acknowledge, as an IT professional, that there are people who need a tutorial on how search boxes work in websites for the most basic of things, and need one every time they get to a new website.. sometimes multiple times for the same website.. and it still doesn't stick with them.
@@alchemystudiosink1894mm ok in that case i'm guessing he just came in with the assumption that it would be bad and kinda ignored all the tutorial stuff then
which is... not good
If you look at the gameplay it looks like he is trying to speedrun all of these games; which is something you should NOT be doing on a first playthrough. Probably the reason why he says things that are provably wrong and why he doesnt understand stuff
What a ride! Most of these honestly wouldve been great if the developers were more experienced, cuz the premises were interesting and of course, micetopias art was adorable.
I think the only good news about curse of the sea rats is the dev's heard the complaints and are reworking the combat system, honestly seems like the game part wasn't done.
Thank goodness. I wnated to see that one salvaged as the art is WAY too good to let it sink like the ship. Plus hand animating those characters in 2D instead of relying on the rather awful puppet animation style is always nice to see. a few of these games definitely could be saved and if being "hard" is the worst part of a game, I say "Challenge accepted!"
I was confusedly staring at the Exodus text box for a good minute, wondering why there was this strange blue box. I had to look really closely to realize it was a portrait. There are magic eye posters that have easier to discern details than that text portrait.
What you did not experience in Curse of the Sea Rats but is quite hilarious is the skills tree. With the default character (the one all the way to the left) you eventually will get a passive that you regain health on hitting an enemy. This is so powerful that every fight, even boss battles is just standing still, not dodging attacks and just mashing your attack button. (at least until 2/3rds of the game where I am now).
Some of the worst part is (up until now) is the janky movement and platforming. In cliffs of wind you have to platform from rock to rock, if you miss you fall to your demise. Which is hard of itself. However they also added wind that will blow you off course if you are not careful. Very frustrating.
There is also an Area called Moonlight Lough where there are invisible bugs (that occasionally turn visible) which explode if you trigger them. Even in their invisible state. Attacking them triggers them to explode as well so the only thing you can do is use your ranged attack in hoping that you hit them all.
I don't want to get the game to test, but I wonder if Humanity Asset was made in the old game engine that has this weird controller loop bug: If you have two controllers, try plugging both of them in, and then launching the game, and see if the low FPS is still there (You know, if you want to continue that sweet Humanity Asset playthrough ofc)
Haha I'll give that a try if I play it again
Humanity Asset - what a name. Instils so much confidence. :D
maybe the real asset was the humanity we found along the way.
sounds like a game someone would play in Rick & Morty.
As a game dev working on a game, watching vids like this really helps to show what players do and dont like, and so I can avoid the mistakes
I can't obviously speak for everyone but I'd say there are at least some things that are common for players to dislike. I believe these are some of them:
1) Crashes, bugs, unfinished or unpolished state of the game. Players who play alpha/beta versions or Early Access games should understand that the game might not fully represent a finished product, and they might not mind it as much. However, aside from that no one likes getting their experience interrupted by a game crashing, having to start the game again and get back to it and perhaps lose a significant amount of progress as a result.
2) Infrequent or rare chances to save the progress. It'd be one thing if the player forgets to save but another if the game doesn't provide a chances to save. This could be save points being too far from each other on the map, no save option in the menu, or similar reasons. Games use different kinds of save systems so there's no universal solution but I'd say a good rule of thumb would be considering the time loss between two separate instances of being able to save the progress. The longer it takes to be able to save the game again the more progress the player may lose if the game crashes or the character dies, and that may lead to frustration if it is happening frequently. Back when I was a teenager and played games in the evening before going to sleep, I remember that I often kept saying to my parents that "I'll stop when I can save the game again" which didn't look good if that happened only after 30 - 60 minutes of playing the game when I was supposed to go to sleep like fifteen minutes ago.
3) Both the lack of content / things to do, and also overwhelming the player with too much information or amount of things to do all at once. In the former, for example, if a game contains combat with enemies then the game may feel empty if there aren't enough enemies, or defeating them doesn't give anything meaningful (typically as in items, currency or experience points); there would be no real reason to defeat those enemies and players would feel less motivated to defeat them. In the latter, for example, the game gives tutorials to all of its 100+ features at the beginning without giving the player time to slowly learn them a few at a time. I remember one game that threw me right into combat before I had a chance to get used to movement and camera in 3D environment. Trying to fix the camera while running from enemies in the middle of the combat was not a great start.
4) Waiting. Unskippable cutscenes, long loading times, traveling through a long area back and forth without features to speed up the travel (such as a vehicle, dashing, fast travel, etc.). What I include in "waiting" in this context is not just not interacting with the game (using the controls) but the time between player having fun; doing boring, dull or mundane things between things they find enjoyable and interesting. In those situations the player is "waiting until fun starts again". I don't mean to say that the game needs to be "fun" the whole time, and a good game can contain times when the player starts to wait; those can become moments to take a healthy break from the game and continue it later. What makes this part difficult is that different players may find enjoyment in different things. Some may watch every single cutscene (at least on their first time seeing it), some may talk to every single NPC in the game (maybe even multiple times), or they may just admire the scenery and take the long way to admire the visuals and background music of the game without using any fast travel options they are given.
5) Forcing or limiting the player (too much), especially without a reason.
I hate it when a game forces me to use my own consumables as part of a tutorial; it's different if an item is given as part of the tutorial but that's not always better either. For example, the game is doing a tutorial on upgrading a weapon by adding a gem into a slot. However, the weapon the game chooses happens to be the first weapon in the inventory, not the weapon you've been using the past few hours. There have also been times when a game is handholding me so much that in my mind I just pray that the game lets me continue playing soon rather than doing "click here, then click here, next click and do this, and then do this" when it's trying to instruct me how to do a certain thing in the game. A little bit of that is fine (depends on the context) but continuing that easily leads to 4th point: Waiting for fun.
Many games are limiting where the player can go, and this is sometimes within a reason: It'd be harder to make a map that expands infinitely in every direction. In story driven games a player may need to complete certain main objectives before moving on to the next area. For example, there is a broken bridge and the player must find materials and an NPC who can fix the bridge before they can continue. Another example would be having to find a source of light before entering a dark cave. One more example: Player tries to enter a different area but either the player character or an NPC says something like "We shouldn't stray too far because we need to return the camp before nightfall.", and this would be more of a story reason because physically there should not be a reason to enter another area but it can't be done because someone said so. The game may also poke fun at the player by using something like "Oh, somehow I got lost; this isn't the way to the village at all.", basically blaming the player's "poor sense of direction" even if the player just wanted to explore. A good thing about informing the player like this is to let them know that there an area past this point, and this isn't actually the edge of the map and the player may want to retry entering the area at a different time.
Some of the things in this category can be good or bad depending on how they are implemented, and not all of them are necessarily always bad.
I'm sure there are more than these things but these were something that I could think of after a little bit of thinking. I personally believe that a game with well designed and well thought gameplay mechanics (game features) and game systems (menu, in-game UI, saving, etc.) are far more important than graphics and sounds. Some games that looked appealing may offer the worst possible gaming experience, and it would be hard to come back to a game like that no matter how pretty the game looks. On the other hand a game with solid and polished gameplay experience may be enjoyable even if it would take a bit of time to get used to the graphics and soundtrack. Not saying that those aspects of a game aren't important but if the players starts complaining about bad controls, bad camera, bugs, crashes, etc. then you can be sure it will likely do worse than a game that receives complaints of not so impressive visuals or sounds.
Also how low the bar for a good game is. Starting off is intimidating, but it's nice to see that you don't have to produce the next hollow knight to justify releasing on steam. Just not being incompetent is good enough, so in a way these bad devs makes it easier for the good devs to overcome their imposter syndrome haha
Careful! This is not a regular player, this was made by someone that needs to generate as many clicks as possible with this video. He NEEDS to find flaws and exaggerate how much he hates them in order to make it more "interesting". Also, taste is different and the AAA titles already cover the ultimate mixes of the most commonly loved game mechanics. That means, if you have a different taste, you are starving for some change. So, please do not make too many notes ... for example I don't see what's wrong with recovering stamina like they did in the first game listed, Exodus.
@@Puschit1 fireborn isn't the one that gave these games their negative reviews. And in fact he was more charitable than those reviews. Go look at the ones for micetopia and you'll see they're even more harsh.
And the problem with exodus's stamina system is pretty obvious. The regeneration rate is too slow for any sort of meaningful stamina management in the midst of combat like in the souls games they're most likely aping. It's just forcing the player to either run away and play keep away, which isn't particularly fun or interesting, or, more likely, to simply ignore enemies whenever possible. There's a reason games with mechanics like this (which actually includes hollow knight) always make it health that regenerates this way, not stamina. And that's because you can keep playing the game with low health until there's an opening to heal. But if you don't have the stamina to attack, you have no option but to run away/wait until it regenerates.
Wouldn't take much advice from this making games is very hard this could have been some of these people's first attempt at a game and was just want to release something.
Holy hell, I only caught the stream during micetopia and didn’t realize what a mess this stream was lmao
The part where you fell to your death going after the coins you misled people. There was a small outcropping you would have landed on had you hugged the wall to the right as you fell. You fell past it and thats why you died.
Yeah but..... still.... you lead people down that cliff only for them to PERMANENTLY miss out on those... that's worse than the invisible ? block trolls put in Kaizo levels. At least with those you only lose 1 life and look stupid. This one might require the whole game to be restarted if you're going for 100%.
TBH the saddest part here is the sheer number of these that acutally have some pretty neat style as far as art & presentation. Like clearly Someone Cared, they just couldn't make it work
Alright, my biggest take on this video is that Metroidvania are actually hard to make and that you're a God, I finally found a game that was puzzling my mind. Chip's Challenge had been a massive blank in my life, wondering what was the name of the game I used to play younger, and then BOOM! A video that's not about this game, gave me the answer, thank you, I now have it in my library, god speed my friend!
>plays inescapable
>gets softlocked
guess it's inescapable
This is what waiting for SilkSong does to a mf 😭
CABBAGE WATER
CABBAGE WATER
CABBAGE WATER
CABBAGE WATER
CABBAGE WATER
CABBAGE WATER
Was Interested if you would run into some hidden gems this way. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Also I liked it when you put in your live commentary and would have preferred to hear that more often in your videos
Well, to be fair, I wouldn't really expect hidden gems to be among the lowest rated unless they have very few reviews.
@@TheOneGuy1111 Negative reviews could also be the result of people being cynical about something that has nothing to do with the game's quality. "Indivisible" comes to mind (although I have no idea about its actual Steam reviews), which was a fantastic RPG that I believe had eventual DLC planned. But from what I've heard, the game did poorly, and the DLC cancelled; through no fault of the game itself, but because of people getting in a frenzy over some incredulous activity from one of the people involved in the game. Assuming what I vaguely read was indeed true.
@@gurvmlk I'm aware of that, but here's the thing: Even if a lot of people are reviewing bombing a good game due to some controversy, not _everyone_ reviewing it will be doing so. There will be _some_ people judging it fairly, and as such, while it may drop to much lower than it deserves, it will never reach the ranks of the absolute worst rated. Furthermore, reviews are more likely to be fair after the controversy dies down, meaning even if a game were to reach to point of being one of the worst rated this way, it won't stay that way.
By the way, I looked up "Indivisible" on Steam, it's rated "Mixed" from recent reviews and "Mostly Positive" from all reviews. Make of that what you will.
@@TheOneGuy1111 I know. I'm just suggesting that it isn't impossible to find a hidden gem among the supposed trash. And that game was the one possible example that came to mind. I've never actually looked at the Steam reviews though, since I don't care for reviews in general. I only even learned about the controversy after I beat the game, and was looking up how to get a secret that turned out to be a map glitch.
@@gurvmlk For what it's worth, I stand corrected; I just learned that Overwatch 2 is among the top 10 worst rated games on Steam overall.
This reminds me of that one episode of The disastrous life of Saiki K when he plays terrible video games lol 😂
It'd be also fun to see how you'd end up ranking them (e.g. if nr 9 deserves that spot in the list of these 10 and so on)
I imagine Sea Rats was envisioned as a game where the people were turned into rats, but then the design shifted to them just always being anthropomorphic rats alá Great Mouse Detective or just outright have rat people instead of regular people, but that one line was never changed ?
Hehe, we furry artists always have to dance around our target audience. I'm SURE Hal felt the same way making Clawroline, Nintendo having Cat Mario, and the Zonai being anthropomorphic goat rabbits as the original ancestors of the Hylians before realizing how much of an untapped market they were overlooking. Heck Sonic's already a hedgehog and despite his games getting roasted at every turn, he's still one of the most popular icons in the world. Like people REALLY would want the game to succeed on the artwork alone.
Just found this channel but I got to say this was really entertaining and funny. You definitely getting this sub, keep up the good work!!
I was actually interested in Yeomna when it was announced a while ago, it looked awesome, but it just goes to show art style does not a fun game make.
Just one reason why I never trust trailers that don't show actual gameplay (no idea if that's applicable to Yeomna, I'm just talking in general).
Reminds me of that infamous game where you collect some cards and if you get 20, you unlock some lewd anime girl art, but the Playstation version was like "Absolutely not" and replaced the anime girls with really nice, wholesome yet well drawn bunnies... and that was the whole reason the PS version was the best one by far. You literally only played the game for the artwork. Honestly, sometimes, animation and artwork is best as just that, an animation or interactive animation. Plenty of fantastic flash games were just that, like "Animator vs Animation" which was a fantastic video, but made for a terrible game. And Henry stickman, again fantastic animation sequences, but the gameplay knew it only had to be a few button clicks here and there and didn't try to be more than that.
Still I can respect them going for that Okami aesthetic, but gameplay can heavily get in the way sadly. Probably should strictly have been a puzzle platformer instead of metroid vania.
I love your content fire born excited for this video!
"They call themselves a game studio even if they never made a game before"
That is a pretty weird criticism lmao
I actually own Dark Matter and, for the record, the reason the game is the way it is is because it was never finished. It was the product of a failed Kickstarter, and the devs were forced to abandon it when they ran out of money. The game actually showed a lot of potential, but in the state it’s in, I don’t think it should be for sale on Steam.
Overwatch on steam is reviewed lower than all of these
As a gamedev I want to take a second to mention that making a game is really fucking hard. All of these devs put in effort to make something they're proud of, and even if the result didn't turn out great, it was a learning opportunity for them. I don't know how these ended up on steam- that seems like a slight lack of self-awareness- but we should still appreciate the amount of hard work that went into each of these.
Yeah, I'd look forward to the next few games from some of these makers or other games from some of these artists. Micetopia actually looks good enough as a little gamer snack.
No
I wouldn't say any of these games show "pride" in one's work. These games seem like the work of people who were willing to publish _and sell_ something that was clearly unfinished. Products with a level of quality that the devs themselves would never waste time playing, no less pay for. I respect trying. I respect failing. I respect accepting limitations. I don't respect marketing a halfmeasured effort.
@@Graphomite While that's true, it could've also just boiled down to cutting their losses. Perhaps the developers themselves realized that their product didn't turn out well, but they released it to market anyway to try recouping its costs. Rather than throwing it out, and being left with nothing but a massive hole in their wallet.
@@Graphomite Some of these were pretty clearly made by one person learning how to make games with no more marketing than simply putting them up on steam. I don't see an issue with that. They're not trying to con people into thinking that the games are something that they're not like the red goddess one.
Take a shot everytime he says "according to user reviews" and you'll get a quick trip to the hospital as a reward
Glad I wasn't the only one lol
"Most of the enemies in the game are flying and don't have any collision. They fly through floors, walls, and ceilings to reach you..."
_[Gets Sundered flashbacks]_
A lot of these games feel like someone had a neat idea for a level, art style, or mechanic... and then didn't know how to make a full game around it.
I was genuinely following Curse of the Sea Rats on Steam for maybe a year, prior to it's release. Hand drawn animation gives it such charm, thought it'd have gameplay to match that. It's so sad to see how it all ended.
it is actually interesting how you describe Inescapable: 21:22 "like if someone followed a game maker tutorial to create unlockable gates and then spent months designing assets and build a world around that mechanic alone"
when in software development everything can be boiled down to "triggers" and "trigger responses" the big part is masking that to not be apparent or obvious it is happening.
I want to say the reason it is obvious comes from just how many triggers and door that open from somewhere else there are, even though that is kind of what the sub-genre is kind of more generally known for.
Weirdly enough the dev only made one game and is now a software engineer for other games. Guess it helped him find his path one way or another.
Broke: Can it run Crysis?
Woke: Can it run Humanity Asset?
Honestly given that blurb from the minister in Exodus, I was expecting it to attempt to play like Vision Soft Reset, a brilliantly-made metroidvania that I won't go into detail about other than that if you enjoyed Outer Wilds then you'll have a blast with this one
1:50 Interesting, the game must have been made in France or Belgium where they use the AZERTY keyboard layout. I think good quality games usually pick up on your keyboard layout and adjust things accordingly, but I guess it makes sense that a bottom 10 metroidvania wouldn't :)
Thank you for your video & putting in the time to suffer those games so we can learn from it, we are a small studio developing a metroidvania game right now, hopefully we dont end up in this list lol
Hope this becomes a series like the legendary souls-like reviews!
I just want a good, comfy, rodent based Metroidvania.
So much wasted potential with the art
This was really painful...... good vid tho as always!
Oh man I knew I recognised that 999 music.
Nice video!
18:28
"my antivirus had something to say about it"
That made me laugh so hard
In Exodus, it appears as though when you died to fall damage you could have landed on the ledge on the right and then run left again to drop to the bottom. I would say your lost loot was probably down there as it appeared to be leading you that way.
Yeah, he jumped off the cliff to follow the tokens, then didn't actually follow the tokens to the ledge, then didn't actually bother returning to his body/death site to pick up the tokens, so didn't complete the game mechanics lesson, and then because of poor coding the game crashed when he tried to leave the level because he didn't complete the pending task...
Super buggy, but also, maybe the controls were so poor that he could'nt reach that ledge
Great list, fireb0rn! I actually enjoyed Curse of the sea Rats quite a bit, made it to the endboss before losing all interest, I'd argue its by far the overall best game on the list, and I'd also argue that Yeomna deserves its own circle of hell in the bottom-of-the-barrel mv list, fuck that game! I remember making it to the second(?) main boss, a 3-headed worm hydra in a mine level, and the hit detection was beyond abysmal, I attempted it more times than humanly reasonable, making it to the third and seemingly final head before I came to the conclusion, "this boss is literally impossible", Im convinced the devs programmed this thing so it just absorbs all damage. I'd rather play a bad game, than a broken mess any day, and Yeomna, despite being quite pretty, is seemingly beyond repair. As an avid mv lover, I say stay away from this game!
"Good artists, bad developers", the movie
My favorite part of the rat game is when the rats all look at each other and Will Smith is like, "What are we, some kinda Raticide Squad?"
If you want a better metroidvania where you turn into a cat, I highly recommend momodora: reverie under the moonlight. It looks adorable, the music is great and the combat is Excellent
Everyone seems to love this game, but I absolutely loathed it. Bailed in 30 minutes. Literally nothing positive to say about it.
Played it. I thought it was decent!
@@azuarc Yeah I found it underwhelming as well. Not as bad as these games though.
I'm kinda confused about how these are supposed to be the 10 worst games within a quite popular tag on an enormous platform that is Steam, but only 4 or 5 of them got 'Mostly Negative', with the rest having the 'Mixed' review label. I'm thinking that maybe there are multiple spellings of 'Metroidvania' used as tags and there's way more bad stuff where that came from...
I think ratings don't become public until you reach a certain amount, so many of the smallest games (e.g. super obscure, obvious asset flips etc) will just have no review score even if they're objectively worse?
@@GameDevYal makes sense
Steam Reviews are the vast majority of the time heavily geared in favour of positive reviews.
you know, the main problem when people decides to make a metroidvania is the developer's only ever played either Castlevania SotN or Hollow knights, and only understand these games on a surface level. Even though, in my opinion, Hollow knights is a metroid-like not a metroidvania, in order to properly build a metroidvania of success, you have to understand the basic needs of a metroidvania, what makes a metroidvania, and more important, how can you make yours be distinguished from the others in the market, be it writing, gameplay, aesthetic, pick one and make it your best asset.
In castlevania, you had a pretty good reasonbto explore, you could find secret bosses, there are the familiars, weapons, consumables, armors, new enemies, an entire fucking side quest giving you an alternate ending, new areas, plus the soundtracks, nearly every castlevania released after SotN follow the same chemistry, some throwing their own pzass in it, like the soul system from Aria/down of sorrow(GBA), The use of Glyphs from order of Eclessia(NDS), and the cards from lament of inocence(GBA,Lament of innocence might be the one the PS2, i don't remember).
Some of the games featured here could achieve level of success similar to hollow knights and castlevania, but their development basicaly ended post release, as if games nowdays didn't need patches and updates to keep it stable and maintain their audience engaged, sell a DLC or two so the dev team is kept afloat even.
in order to build a metroidvania, you have to play AND study these games to understand what makes them, and ask the hard questions:
why do we have to explore ?
why this system is like this ?
why this work like this and not like this ?
how big should the map be ?
this kind of thing.
This gives me confidence in the games that I'm building. If I can avoid the pitfalls these games fall into, I'll feel accomplished.
Okay, be nice to Curse of the Sea Rats!! It clearly had so much love put into it's art direction. It's a charming little game that's just doing it's best. We need more rat games in the world
I’m so sad that Curse of the Sea Rats wound up so bad. I was really hyped for it!
Seems like it's going to be salvaged though. I think other comments said the dev is still working on bug fixes and tweaking the difficulty.
@@MarioMastar Huh, maybe there’s hope for it. I won’t hold my breath though :P
This was a fantastic video. I cant wait to check out the backlog.
Sea rats didn't have to try and justify the rat part, and that's the most aggravating thing about mentioning the transformation
The worst part is most of these games could have been so much better
2:55 are you thick? Did the thought of checking the place you actually died not cross your mind?
the ONE redeeming quality of an unreliable narrator is the sense of discovery when you finally figure it out
Or just entertainment, like Stanley Parable, where it isn't really even a twist, but like, basically the whole game
The first game is made by a French developer. I already thought it when I saw the space before the exclamation points (Like this !), which is simply the grammatically correct way to use exclamation points and question marks in French... but the ZQSD confirms it. In France, the standard keyboard layout is AZERTY- with the AQ and ZW keys being swapped (along with a few other differences as well).
4:40 ... The game is clearly justifying it in the text you're talking over? They will be given a pardon if they rescue him.
Hollon lemme pull a pyrocynical
Play rain world
I was about to give inescapable credit for at least having a "puzzle", but then I realized how poorly designed it is. If they wanted you to get an enemy on top of the button, it shouldn't look like every other bog standard killable joe, lest the player offs it prematurely
"It has no controller support despite launching in 2013" Now imagine how I feel when games launching in 2023 have no controller support.
Honestly nihil search didn't look that bad. I might try it out if it doesn't cost too much
Apparently the lesson to takeaway from this is: If you want to make a good looking Metroidvania, make sure it's about rodents.
"Micetopia has a nice aesthetic"
Me: Heh heh heh, mice aesthetic
I came to the comments for this pun. 😀
about micetopia... it's aesthetics are EXTREMELY similar to the game called "Himno: The Silent Melody". purple crystals and cave walls have basically the same assets, maybe a bit tweaked. himno released at 20 Oct 2021 (also there is free alpha version that came out back in 2019), micetopia at 16 Dec 2022, so the conclusion is obvious I think.
Looking at the two, the purple crystals are the only thing that I would describe as extremely similar. But they're still not identical. The cave tiles are only really similar in that they're pixel art cave tiles. And the artstyles for the rest of the games are pretty noticeably different.
I was initially in the "this is probably an asset flip/plagiarized" camp for Micetopia. But, having done a bit of digging on it, I no longer believe that to be the case. They've since released another game that looks stylistically similar that has two robot bosses that 1) I don't think could have been plagiarized without them getting caught and their games pulled from steam/the nintendo store and 2) suggest to me that whoever made them is a good enough pixel artist to have also made the assets for Micetopia.