しんせいかつ (2024)

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"New Life" is a short free game about constantly doing the same morning routine. Nothing really changes other than the window you look out from. Not horror, but at least it's free. Scenery is nice.

I'm leaving a positive review to support smaller studios who aren't publishing garbage. I would actually evaluate this as a "meh". I think it's fair since it's only some kind of demo with underwhelming features. But again, it's just a kind of demo. There's nothing wrong in poor replayability and functionality, it's just for show. There is potential for actual gameplay, such as having a larger home with, for example. Animated scenes, such as eating at a table, petting a dog, admiring paintings, flushing a toilet, etc. The "F" interaction seem to be buggy. The interactions appear to be only available in some order. It doesn't look bad. But from my own preferences, I prefer sharper visuals than this. Which combines motion blur, bloom, potentially chromatic abberation, mouse/camera smoothing, (maybe? depth of field), (maybe? TAA). I prefer FXAA/SMAA and all the other mentioned visual effects to be turned off.

"しんせいかつ" (shinseikatsu, "New Life") is not really a game, it's a short, I don't know, demo? It's just an apartment scene rendered in UE5. No game loops, nothing to do, just look at what might possibly be a bunch of flipped assets. Amazing what people will waste $100 Steam Direct dollars publishing, isn't it? What do you do in the game? Nothing. The "developer" didn't bother with an English translation, but we don't need one. The language of shovelware is universal. The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?" While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't. The game assets here look a lot better than the actual game they're assembled on... that doesn't mean this is necessarily an asset flip or a kitbash, because there's no proof. But what matters is tha…