The Hidden and Unknown game (opens in new tab) It released on Steam this week and comes with a ridiculous price tag of $1,999.90. This means you can finish without exceeding the playtime limit for Steam’s no-questions-asked refund. However, don’t worry if he doesn’t have two grands to blow you away in this game temporarily. I’ve played it and haven’t missed anything.
The creator of The Hidden and Unknown uses ThePro and told TheGamer earlier this week (opens in new tab) They said that the high price reflected the value of the semi-autobiographical visual novel to them.
“I don’t want to get anyone into financial trouble,” said ThePro. “I’m just pricing the game as I see fit. This is my right.”
The developer made a similar statement to PCGamesN (opens in new tab)and the game is about sharing their stories and “making people realize that even if you’re in a bad situation, you can still work with what you have.”
Oh, I think a lot more than that.
The Hidden and Unknown begins with an eight-minute Star Wars scroll that explains the imbalance between male and female energies. An imbalance between male and female energies turns Western men infertile due to testosterone depletion, makes women increasingly masculine, and ultimately leads to the end of the war. Human race. So this $2,000 philosophy lesson of his turns out to be exactly the same retrograde gibberish supplement.
After introducing a time-traveling AI entity that perfectly balances masculine (“thinking”) and feminine (“feeling”) energies, the dogmatic preface is an unassuming, almost non-selfish statement about a child named Brian. Replaced by interactive visual novels. The characters are not visually depicted, only the locations are apparently created with the help of an AI image generator.
The story is a compilation of anecdotes from Brian’s youth, seemingly drawn from the creator’s own tumultuous life experiences, but mostly mundane. It could be soccer practice, the time you looked smart in class, or the time you went to bed and woke up the next morning. About the online games he played. Some of the sympathetic passages are undermined by everything: Bryan’s transformation into a testosterone-rich superman whose ex-girlfriend can no longer manipulate him (he read Sun Tzu’s tactics of war). , depression is hindered by masculine habits, such as getting enough sleep and regular exercise.
I’ve never written a gender essentialist manifesto about estrogen addiction in Western men, but there are certainly some immature old diaries and short stories I’m glad I didn’t have the urge to publish. and hope you read them. With any luck, they’ll appreciate those choices one day.
Again, without the stunt price, The Hidden and Unknown, like so many other bad games and novels, could have been completely ignored. There are reviews and accounts that don’t own them can’t leave them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they paid. /10” is simply stated. Next, say, “Worth every penny.”
A third review skipped the irony, calling The Hidden and Unknown “the worst game ever made” and “meaningless misanthropic garbage”. That reviewer points out that they received the game for free, so even in this case the axiom that you get what you pay for still holds true.
The Hidden and Unknown isn’t the first game to incorporate Steam’s refund policy into its design. Last year, in a game called Refund Me If You Can, I was able to escape the maze in less than two hours and get my money back just in time. I think the playful metacontext design is fun, but I think I like the maze example better.
