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malvin's prehistoric adventures looked like something made in rpgmaker at first, and while it was made in unity, the experience ended up just as bad.

the story's about a bubble-thing called danny, who's a spirit of time about to fail his history exam and repeat the year, so he travels to earth to bug a random kid with his problem. together they go on an adventure through time, not unlike bill & ted, to find some random items from each prehistoric era. the kid does all the heavy lifting, that's why his name is in the title instead of danny's.

after laying down some basics while getting a t-rex tooth from the museum, there are 26 levels (time periods), unlocked in batches of 3, but once you solve them and move on to the next trio, they get locked again. each level has a relic (usually a piece of stone, sign of the times) to be retrieved after solving a few puzzles, often using items from other levels, then you need to talk to danny to finish a level.

there are sliding jigsaws (for lack of a better term), mazes, pushing rocks into holes, simon says, and a bunch of arcade levels or the occasional timer to ruin things. a skip puzzle option would be nice, as well as a visible inventory to know what you have, though whatever needs to be used will be used if available.

controls are pretty bad and inconsistent. movement with wasd or arrows, very slow and no sprinting, but only wasd moves the cursor during a puzzle and either space or enter (but not both) is for whatever action is necessary, and with several pieces in some cases it's a pain to cycle through them all before finding the one you want, because wasd is not for selection, it's for movement of the selected piece. no mouse support whatsoever.

'f' interacts, exits puzzles, picks up items, etc. and shift leaves the level immediately, always going back to the first level of the batch, very annoying. no progress lost, but if you press shift while moving, the game goes back to level select and the character keeps moving. and levels have to be quit manually anyway, even after you're done and heard the fanfare, no idea why.

windowed mode and resolutions through the unity launcher, english and russian languages with plenty of typos, grammatical errors and missing punctuation in the former. the graphics are okay, though there's a lot of wasted screen space and no audio settings and a ridiculously small font.

while a kid-friendly time travel puzzle/adventure sounds good on paper, the whole thing is very amateurish and not fun to play, needs a lot of work to be recommendable at any price, let alone what they're asking for. I gave up during the fourth trio of levels with the slippery stones and a bunch of simon says, so I'd say it should take around 3 hours to complete, but you'd better stay away.

Malvin’s Prehistoric Adventures is an puzzle/adventure game that takes you through a variety of prehistoric environments and tasks you with solving short puzzles along the way.

The game’s story revolves around Malvin, a small child, and Danny, a time-travelling spirit. In order to complete his homework assignment, Danny enlists Malvin to help him collect assorted artifacts from different points in time. The plot isn’t engaging and feels bland. Beyond the initial exposition, there is little story and the game just uses it to drive you toward the next puzzle. This is far from a deal breaker, especially in a puzzle game, but given the game’s other issues, the lack of plot drives home the fact that this game is underdeveloped.

Gameplay is similarly weak, primarily due to the basic puzzle design. Most puzzles aren’t explained, so it can be confusing if you don’t already understand what the game wants you to do. Nearly every puzzle is too simple to be challenging. It’s a game that becomes boring almost instantly.

Visually, the game is mediocre at best. Nothing about the art style is particularly offensive, but it’s certainly generic. The music and sound design aren’t great either. It does a decent job of being background music, but it exacerbates the game’s main issue of boring simplicity.

Malvin’s Prehistoric Adventure is an underwhelming game full of poorly designed puzzles and an exceedingly dull plot. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless they plan on giving the game to a small child. While the game is probably to challenging for a kid to play on their own, it might be fun for a child playing with a parent. Outside of that, this game won’t appeal to many people.

2/10

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Malvin`s Prehistoric Adventures is a fun and relatively casual, puzzle adventure. In this game, you'll get to join Malvin as he is coerced by a young Spirit of Time called Danny, who also happens to be a lazy student, into helping Danny with his homework just so he won't get held back for another year. Taking things in stride, Malvin travels back in time to different eras with Danny to solve various puzzles and collect the correct samples as required by Danny's homework assignment.

Whimsical story aside, the puzzles in this game are fairly straightforward, and most of them are easy enough to solve. However, I've managed to get myself stuck in a puzzle where I was in the process of extracting the pieces of a shovel from rocks using a pickaxe. The challenge here lies in not describing what the puzzles are about. Don't get me wrong - I still managed to solve the puzzles before it without knowing how a puzzle work or the rules, but this particular puzzle completely eludes me. Tried every possible trick I knew too!

Due to this, I think that the developers should add a couple of lines of dialogues for Danny which would serve as hints when Danny is talked to on a level with an unsolved puzzle. Another major issue with the game is the incredibly small font size. This needs rectifying asap!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTBctEQju2E&feature=youtu.be

+ Fun and mostly simple puzzles to solve.
+ Seems like a nice puzzle adventure for younger audiences (Middle school maybe)
+ Many levels to play. They unlock in batches of three. Solve previous levels to unlock the next batch

- Puzzles don't come with instructions or rules. Some can be hard to figure out.
- Incredibly small font size for the texts
- The story, despite being rather whimsical, and the characters can be a bit lackluster. I'm not a fan of Danny mainly because he forces Malvin to do his homework for him. Do your own dang homework!
- $7 is a bit high for this game IMHO, partly because I'm not sure most people could get 7 hours out of the game if you tend to equate price with playtime provided; and partly because of the production value. Might want to wishlist it for now and wait a bit for a discount if you're interested.

If you like this review and would like to follow me for more, please feel free to drop by my curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33780629-The-Midcore-Gamer/

Malvin`s Prehistoric Adventures is a simple mobile/Flash type adventure puzzle game with a paleontology theme. Control a cartoony vector art kid around and solve various puzzles. The game is quite unpolished and the interface is frustratingly clunky... like you can start some puzzles before you pick up the necessary clues, and if you can't solve the puzzle, you can't escape it, locking you out of the game (although you can press "Esc" and quit the game, which so far is the best feature it has).

The technical delivery is on par with the sloppy game design and lack of polish, 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 low quality vector 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 mediocre 2D visuals.

The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2023 (and this was released not so far back in 2020), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.

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 2 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

Malvin`s Prehistoric Adventures has the utterly unrealistic price of around $7 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.

Profile Features Limited!

Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.