I was here

[quote]Warning: Asset Flip!
"I was here" is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few online game assets and stock images, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.[/quote]

It's a crappy quiz game where you look at one of the photos the developer stole off the internet and guess what country it is. It would be more fun trying to guess which image hosting site the developer stole it from.

You get two choices for which sets of photos you want to look at. Europe, or, guess which country... yeah, Russia.

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.

In this case, the asset flipper stole a bunch of stock landscape photos from the internet and is trying to get YOUR money for someone else's intellectual property by shoving those stolen pictures into a very basic quiz game template... that the developer ripped off from a Unity tutorial/template/demo pack. It has no value or merit as a real game.

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.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

This kind of asset flipping isn't harmless. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games from ethical developers. It makes it harder for genuine indie developers, who put hard work into trying to make real games, to find an audience for their products. It gives indie developers a bad name.

So, should you buy this asset flip? Is this better than any of the 110,000+ genuinely made games on Steam? Of course not!

"I was here" has the gamer gouging price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.

For comparison, the $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "Dishonored 2", "Pillars of Eternity II" or "Grand Theft Auto V". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

I thought I was fairly good at geography until I couldn't get past a single level on EASY mode without googling. I gave up after level 5 as it just wasn't enjoyable. Controls were frustrating as well. Trying to get rid of the journal to go back to take an obviously wrong guess was rage quit level of annoying. The achievements also give away the city names used in the game. Why wouldn't they make them hidden? Or not have an achievement for every.single. level and instead just have an overall easy mode completed etc. achievement. Would not recommend.

Geographical guessing game. On easy, you get 4 pictures and 3 trivia facts to guess a town in Europe (or the former Soviet Union?). This might be exciting if the photography was better, but as it is, it's a simple concept cheaply implemented.
There are geographical guessing games based on Google Streetview that are much better.

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It's my fault that I didn't read the entire description of this game. I have no idea that all photos will be from Europe and Russia. I was stuck in every level. This is too hard for me. I don't know how well for an European or Russian will do in this game but for me who is neither from those regions, it's a torturing experience.

Obscure cities even on Easy difficulty, irrelevant pictures (I couldn't guess that was Bruxelles, and I visited it last spring...) doesn't support multiple names for cities (i.e. Koln / Cologne, Bruxelles / Brussels) bad font that's hard to read... too many things need fixing before this can be labelled a proper game. Too bad, I liked the idea and I would play a proper implementation.
Right now, the way to progress is to read the city facts and google them. Boring.
Oh, and it focuses on Russia and Eastern Europe, with cities like Olonets, Torun, Solovski, Kobuleti, Skopje etc in the Easy difficulty setting.

It's a nice little game, but I would only recommend buying it on sale because it needs improvement, in my opinion.

I played the European part in Easy and Normal. The cities seem to repeat itself in the Normal part. Some places I have never heard of, but I used Google to find them out and it's nice that you learn something about new cities. The Easy part should be way easier and the cities in the Normal part should be different ones. Maybe use more cities from South/West Europe, too?

I bought it on sale for 1,69€ and for this price I would recommend it, it's fun for a while and it has potential. I hope the developers make something more out of it, though. :)

what is the city of Easy level 10 of Europ?
I was stuck in here.

The most boring game in the world. Completed the Europe section at easy, normal and hard (which turned out to be not really that hard), but the Commonwealth Of Independent States section at easy level is the most difficult and the most impossible, with facts that offer no clues as to the city concerned at all and the photos don't really give you much of a clue either, the photos are always of some random buildings that are not very well known or that no-one knows about.

Don't bother wasting your money. The people at Okinawa Sunrise have absolutely no clue at all about what makes a good game. This is just about the most worst game in the world.