Sullen: Light is Your Friend

I am 32 years old.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing.

Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side.

With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happiness of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay.

After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like.

Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends.

Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together.

Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

Thank you.

[quote]Warning: Asset Flip![/quote]"Sullen: Light is Your Friend" is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unity asset store packs, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.

Giving Russian and Brazilian asset flippers a run for their money once more, this time we have a Turkish entry in the race to the bottom, showing us truly that asset flip scammers transcend borders, bringing the world together for a quick scammed lira. This is your usual Russian style jumpscare game... creating such an asset flip is trivial and takes less than a weekend. First, you steal some 3D model/asset for a house/neighbourhood, drop it on a first person adventure template, fill out some stuff/add a stolen monster asset or two, and then quickly dump it on Steam as fast as possible, then wait for the cash to roll in.

This one has some 1980's imagery stapled on the front and takes place in an asset flipped neighbourhood. The developer pulled out all the stops and added a VHS filter to the template. Wander around, but don't get seen by the asset flipped monster, or you'll get jumpscared! That's the game. Same as all the other jumpscare adventure asset flips glutting Steam. Except this one is abandoned in an incomplete state (are asset flips ever complete games??).

Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.

This game has been translated from Turkish into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers.

The game was abandoned roughly 8 months after launch and hasn't been updated in almost 6 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed.

Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Sullen: Light is Your Friend" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for trying to play the asset flip, trivial to achieve, but less than 3 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Now, while this review has been solely about the asset flip "game", some notes about the "developer", because as I often say, while reviews are about the games, gamers must always be made aware if a developer acts unethically, because buying games from unethical developers puts your money at risk.

The developer revoked thousands of game keys from paying customers, an act of brazen fraud/theft. If you buy a game from this developer, there's no guarantee they won't revoke your key as well. They've done it before. They also switch between different developer accounts to try hide their identity... make sure to read game reviews before buying games, as many reviewers have rightly tried to warn gamers in their reviews. This is very helpful for consumers.

Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount from time to time. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay.

Furthering the unethical nature of this developer, while they are selling this incomplete game under Valve's failed Early Access program, they're abusing that program, and not working on this game full time, as they have other projects in the works. That means there's ZERO confidence anyone who buys this in Early Access will receive a complete game, and it's possible that they're being scammed.

"Sullen: Light is Your Friend" has the pathetically optimistic price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Rainbow 6 Siege", "This War of Mine" or "Battlefield V". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam.

Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.

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Pure ...

asd

What the...

In 2020, this game's "developer" illegally revoked thousands of keys he had sold on various sites. He made up a bunch of lame excuses and never compensated the legit buyers who had the game removed from their libraries. The game itself is nothing more than a very poor tech demo. It's hard to believe that this is still for sale on Steam.

Pure crap.

Shitty developer revoked the keys of the previous customers.
Probably in order to make them buy the game again (it will be removed soon)

First of all, the quit game (aptly named 'Suicide') placement on the menu is annoying, if you click to skip the opening messages/cutscenes like I did, you may end up closing the game because it's right in the centre of the screen.

If you choose to view the opening messages, it gives a warning about how you shouldn't be playing it if you're pregnant or have heart problems (how considerate...) and that the game is currently only 4% completed. Great start for an early access game that's in the process of being pulled from Steam.

Upon starting the actual game, you're greeted with a few messages about how your best friend went missing and you have to find him or something along those lines of generic horror game cliche garbage. Viewed through the lens of a camera and with a disgustingly inappropriate head bob which can't be turned off and can only be described as sickening, you're on your way to a Unity asset pack house to no doubt get jump scared. I turned my volume down to 5% as it was excruciatingly loud. I won't ruin it for anyone but these things are pretty obvious with budget titles like this.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2136709880

The second level consists of the classic use of a barely working flashlight in an absolutely pitch black map. Ooooo scary. Also for some reason, the protagonist decided to get caught within a constant running animation so the flashlight was flying all over the place as if the character I'm playing has Parkinson's disease.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2136709910

Adding to the monstrosity that this game already is, I took a few steps and fell out of the map. Gaining an achievement in the process for some strange reason, I then tried to quit with ALT + F4 and was greeted with another achievement and some incredibly loud voice yelling, making me incredibly thankful that I turned my volume down earlier as even at 5%, it was at ear bleeding levels. I then minimised the game and exited via task manager.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2136709946

TL;DR: Just another terrible horror game to add to the thousands of others on Steam. Incredibly shallow, generic and basic. Good riddance to this game. 0/10.

This Developer is a Scammer and Liar

This Game is another Slenderman Clone, nothing else to say

Will be removed from Steam, cause Developer lost all Data form this game thanks to a "crypolockervirus"
before that, he revoked all keys he sold before (and said Valve that these were Beta-Keys!) so that people who are "collectors" have to buy it again.

The Developer ( steamcommunity.com/id/franticdreamer )
and the
Game store.steampowered.com/app/525460
should be reported as Fraud/Scam.

Thank you for Reading.

Honest opinion, I like this game, it freaks you out, and start up menu is so cool! Thx for making this spoNk and FranticDreamer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWNIyBrwGa4 See it for yourself, I cant wait for the updates,