Clouded

So I found Clouded by browsing through the All Upcoming Games tab on steam. Which is a bit hard to find since nowadays if you go looking for upcoming games, it shows you Popular Upcoming Games first, which is a great way to filter out a lot of the crap that Steam sells, but it does occasionally mean some good games slip under the radar.

I wasn't sure if this game was going to be any good, but I stuck it on my wishlist anyway because it dared to try something new. You play as a man who wakes up outside his house with no memory of how he got there, with notes written on your arm. According to the writing, you have five minutes to get to your basement. After five minutes you wake up outside again, but the writing on your arm is different now?

So yeah, I thought, that's an interesting enough premise. A couple of days after it came out I checked the reviews and saw it had zero reviews. Which made me a bit sad, thinking this game is going to be completely overlooked. It was cheap and on sale so I bought it with the conviction that I was gonna at least give this game one review, hopefully a positive one, to help spread the message about it.

But...I can't really do that. After playing this game for half an hour the conclusion I've come to is that this is not ready to be a commercial product. I mean, art is art, and this is art, but this feels more like portfolio work? For starters, there's no starting screen, no menu, no options, no way to quit the game without alt-tabbing and closing the game manually.

It's also very short, which is generally not a deal-breaker for me, but again, this feels more like a proof-of-concept than a complete game. Not that I finished it, and here's the big problem: why I couldn't finish it.

You spend your time trying to solve puzzles in this game, mostly by finding and deciphering cryptic notes. But many of the notes, as well as the reminders written on your arm, are “handwritten” (which means written with a mouse in some kinda basic paint program) and they're actually indecipherable, unreadable. I mean, I like a messy, handwritten aesthetic, but you can't let form trump function, and when your secret codes can't be read, yeah, you're crossed that line.

From what I played of the game though, I think I'd still feel disappointed paying for it even if it didn't have that hurdle, and I had been able to finish it. Because again, it doesn't feel like a commercial product, it feels like an experiment, a practice run.

Developer, if you're reading this, as a starting out project, this is great, and I hope you keep it up. But I do think trying to sell this on steam was a misstep. Maybe stick it up on itch.io for free just to show it off. But what do I know? I'm just an opinionated consumer. I absolutely do think artists deserve to be paid for their work. But if you take your half-finished practice paintings to market, you can't really expect people to buy them.