Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator

Looks like a newgrounds game to me very 2016 or 2018ish

Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator is more or less a visual novel/E-book, although it's punctuated by mindless minigames and lightweight RPG stats that really don't make much difference, if any, to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure outcomes in this badly written book. There's enough elements of gameplay I suppose you could call this a game, but that's hardly deserved, because the focus here is on, you guessed it, reading really badly written text.

So, there's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time.

We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. My gaming rig is not a Kindle. And even if it was, I'd read decent books instead of this. We all know that when someone wants to be an author but isn't good enough, yet insists on trying, Steam E-books/Visual Novels are where they turn their efforts to. After all, if they could write professionally, they'd be published authors instead of having to self publish their garbage books for $100 through Steam Direct.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does.

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.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.

A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Studio Namaapa has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

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

The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Mirror's Edge" or "Rust". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator has the almost unethical price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Ten bucks for something that barely qualifies as a game. The public library is free, you know, and so is Project Gutenberg.

For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Mirror's Edge" or "Rust". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

One of the best

on Windows 11, the black screen (before the opening movie) will cause the OS to lock up