20,000 Miles Under the Sea

20,000 Miles Under the Sea is, thankfully, a game that I’m pretty sure has always been free.
To even call this a game is honestly an insult to even the top-tier trash games, such as ABST Clicker Farm and Abscond (Not the actual Abscond Game, but the “developer’s” audacity to release it as their game).

If you’re like me, and you have irritating, but very true thoughts pop into your head now and again, then you’ll know that there’s a certain point in life where the question: “How high can you count?” goes from being a matter of knowledge to a matter of will.

That is this “game”.

This “game” is just a test of mental endurance to see how long you can last, staring at a screen, while you lethargically descend into the depths of the ocean.
There is not much to look at, you can’t look around or explore really. The only option you have in the game is “Auto-swim”, where you just descend, and “Not Auto-Swim” where you just descend, but you can sluggishly swim forward.
Shoals of fish randomly spawn in and out with glitchy animations and bad implementation overall, phasing through solid rock and coral. Even Mario 64 had fish that you could interact with.

Of course, you can’t have an underwater game without having a horror element! So, only in the description of this game on Steam will you see that:

This is a simple idle horror game, and all that is required of you is to observe the life of the underwater world and wait.

Continued with:

But please remember that you are not alone – a terrible creature inhabits this abyss. If you’re too scared to meet this monster, you can tap out any time you like…

Ooo spooky, so where is this terrible sea creature?
It doesn’t exist.
All it is, is a terribly done jumpscare, which is easily avoided in one of two ways. Keep auto-swim on, as if you’re in auto-swim mode it doesn’t touch you for some reason (either that or the RNG was super unlucky), or moving away from the obvious red dots.

What also doesn’t exist is this bullshit.

Yeah, I don’t think you’re fooling anyone with this.

Yeah, you weren’t fooling anyone.

As far as I could tell, using all the resources that I could, the soundtrack was not bought once.
Checking Steam sale records and various other 3rd party sites that track information like this, I found absolutely nothing.
This was a clear attempt to get people to play it, so they could get better feedback for the game (which never happened) and get some pennies back.
As discussed in the Abscond review/investigative piece that I wrote, it costs around $100 for developers to publish a game on Steam. It makes sense that the devs would make a desperate grab at their financial loss of a release.

Aside from this, what else do we have in the game?

• Horrendous crashes that persist after the developer has updated/patched the game twice to “fix” these errors. Happening so often that I experienced at least 5 crashes within the 24 minutes I was able to hold out.
• No option to mess with the sound. If there is, I cannot find it. Pressing the escape key, in hope that it would bring up a menu, took me out of the game and “marked my name” where I stopped. I had to start all over again. Thanks, this is undoubtedly what I wanted.
• No clear indication, in the game, of how to play or that you have to avoid the red dots, or how to avoid them. Nothing telling you what or how to do things at all.
• The “game” is so mind-numbing that the developer themselves instruct you: “you can minimize the game and continue to go down, doing other things.” if it’s too “tiring”. Just leave the game on, minimise it and do something more fun is their advice. Thanks, again. Brilliant game.
• To add to the last point, the game is so badly optimised. Not to mention the crashes again, which are probably partially caused by this issue, but this “game” eats up all of your resources because of the bad optimisation. GPU? Gone. RAM? Gone. Shaders people! Fix your fucking shaders!

And to top it all off, is the most annoying part of the game. The name markers.
So, you accidentally exited out the game, or you’ve had enough, and you exit the game. That’s a name marker added with your name on it, but it’s not just you who can see it. Everyone can.

And you can’t turn it off.

You must sink, 20k feet, staring at the blur of mashed up names as so many people either crashed or gave up within the first 5 minutes. It’s then evenly spacing out a bit more until you reach the 30-minute mark, and another massive mash of names again where people have taken a gigantic sigh and turned the game off.

The “beautiful, underwater scenery” in this game, you want to see it? Too bad, you’ve got to stare at this clusterfuck of names.
Thank goodness, the game doesn’t “start” until you get past this absolute mess, although, I doubt you’ll be paying attention to find that out.

Price: N/A
Time To Complete: Apparently around an hour.
Achievements: 28
Cards: N/A
Worth The Money: It’s not even worth being free, to be honest.

It’s not worth a fun rating.

0 Out Of 10

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While it is not the country of origin that defines the type of game a developer produces, you will find that a lot of “Shovelware” comes from Russia. People who are well versed in Steam and cheap games will know this already.
I can only see so far, and my scope is limited to so many, different variables:
— Time of purchase
— Impulsivity
— Jumping on bundles/sales
— Complete disregard for my own enjoyment, just to sate an urge to buy something that looks bad.

Yeah, I’m bullshitting, but it’s a half-truth. There have been Brazilian games and Portuguese and English games I’ve played that all fit these categories. Cheap games, made to barely hold themselves together, to sit on Steam and slowly farm pennies until the $100 is paid back before Steam finds the game and deletes it. But not as many as I have Russian.
This is predominantly because of where I bought these games initially, and where I get them from now.

DailyIndieGame is one of the big reasons as to why I have a lot of these (apart from the few times I went to Russian sites and paid £10 for 250 games) games are in my Steam library. The promise is, from the site, to highlight creator’s games. Giving them out in bundles for small prices. It’s honestly a decent way to do things, but after a while I had to take a step back and check what I was actually buying because… ehhhhhhh. I maybe just paid £0.66 for The Wasteland Trucker, but… Yuck, I paid THAT, for THIS??

Another culprit (of no bad means) is Steamdb’s Free Game activator. Any time a game goes up for free, whether just newly released for free or discounted to free, it will activate it on your account. It’s responsible for the fact I have over 11k items in my library now and if you load up my steam games list IT WILL CRASH YOUR CLIENT/BROWSER.

It’s safe to say, you can expect a lot more Shovelware reviews. We’ve got my whole library to look forward to reviewing.

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Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.