Dear Future

⠀

[i] Beautiful Water [/i] [i] Reminds me of You [/i] [i] Sea Forever [/i] [i] A tribute to You [/i]

The real tragedy of this game is that it wasn't ambitious enough. This seems like a really great concept. A timed photo shoot in an abandoned, decayed, weird sci-fi city? Sign me up. The problem is that it completely stumbles over its own feet in the execution of that idea. The biggest struggle is that there's just not a lot to see. This is a very large world, and was somehow surprisingly empty. Because the game uses the same assets over and over, any time you find something really interesting in the world, if you walk a few feet, you're guaranteed to see the same thing repeated twenty times over. I remember coming upon a strange, Greek temple on a shoreline, and thought, "wow, what an interesting design," only to see the same temple copy-pasted 3 more times past the next building. It's because of this reuse of assets, and very minimal amounts of unique variety, that makes this a bother. Very rarely does the world offer interesting vistas, and even then, it's a chore to find them. There's also the fact of the mechanics. Again, a timed photo adventure seems really appealing. Get in, get out, and only take what you find important. The problem is that the mechanics are a deliberat…

The graphics are rather bad and the game could be much better if it was no HUD game. The controls are also meh.

Depressing, as in "I wasted 30 minutes of my finite life" depressing. Furthermore, I am not 100% convinced this is truly an "asynchronous multiplayer" experience. The 'notes' you can write are merely a two-part combination of preprogramed options, and I never saw someone else's photo (might have been after the credits, but I was too bored by then). The most this can do is inspire someone else to do better, and at the very least I found more creativity in the reviews. I find myself agreeing with one particular negative review that bashes student projects dumped on steam, whereas before playing I thought it a bit harsh.

"Dear Future" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from UC Santa Cruz in California. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. And the students pushed out... this. Thing. Which is barely a game, it's a non-concurrent multiplayer "experience"... I guess this is hard to explain. You wander around a really badly done, repetitive procgen hellscape with a camera, take some photos, and then the photos and stuff you did gets picked up by the next person to try "play" this "game". What a terrible idea. If the…