There has been a big buzz in the gaming community lately about a game known as Dark Matter, made by Iceberg Interactive. It has officially been pulled from both the Steam store and GOG.com due to reports by users that the game is ‘incomplete’ and has no ending… What? You’re trying to tell me that a game was released that didn’t have an ending?
GG3 dives into the holiday spirit of sales by looking at the worst of the crop first. To ensure no one will ever need to go looking for these games pulled from Steam, some gameplay will be shown from both Ashes Cricket 2013 and Dark Matter. That last one is back on Valve's platform, but...just don't.
GIZORAMA - On paper, Dark Matter sounds great. A 2.5D shooter that attempts to blend the horror and atmosphere of titles like Dead Space with the exploration and structure of industry changers like Super Metroid is a recipe that sounds like it would yield nothing but a guaranteed success. However, despite some genuinely atmospheric elements, Dark Matter unfortunately fails on what it sets out to do at almost every turn leaving in its wake a mess of disappointment and frustration.
After being woken from Cryo-sleep by a seemingly sentient AI, your nameless female protagonist is given little to no back story. All that is shared is that you are some sort of engineer who has been kept alive by the ship in order to save it from an alien threat. Despite brimming with many genre clichés, the opening gambit is sold relatively well here. At first, you are interested in learning more about yourself and the world around you as well as the mysterious AI that seems to be your only companion amidst the isolation. Unfortunately however, you will soon realise that these questions will never be answered to a satisfactory level. It seems that this set up is more akin to a plot device than the origin of an interesting tale meaning any interest soon dissipates
Look, we realize the ending spurred controversy and bugs make their presence felt, yet there's a solid game here from InterWave.
A lot of indie dev teams are taking advantage of Users now and are starting to use Steam's Early Access as an excuse to release unfinished code.
It's getting disgusting how many games are ask you to take a risk in order to develop their games.
In some cases we just get a final release indie game unfinished, or unoptimized or just broken.
Which is a shame to the true indie developers out there that are making games for the love of getting their idea out there.
I started buying indie games because they seemed to take risks and give fresh new ideas or at least take a game that we love and make it better.
Let's hope this is put a stop to.
Slightly off topic but staying on topic I have always thought that any dev big or small should release unfinished or beta games obiously stating that they are unfinished or beta. Its fun seeing how things might have ended up.
A good example of this is COD. The amount of canceled maps that dont get finished but they are still playable would be fun to play.
There are loads of unfinished games that just never got the green light. A good example of that is the batman game set in the times of jack the ripper it looked amazing.