The Franz Kafka Videogame is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. The game essentially tries to profit from the life and times of Franz Kafka by disrespectfully lambasting the poor man... no respect for the dead, they want your money to make light of a famous author. The treatment of the man here is appalling, for such a low quality mobile app to make fun of him and portray him in what I feel is a very bad light. This kind of disrespect for famous figures simply isn't okay, but these mobile app devs do want your money, so I guess that's more important.

The works of Kafka expose deep meanings through his deliberate use of satirical surrealism, shining an artistic mirror against reality to help us better understand it. That's what genuine creative artists do. The mobile app devs here seem to have confused Kafka with a Monty Python member. "Ha ha, surrealism!!!! Let's make some money off that!!!!". Unfortunately there's no law against such hamfisted portrayals of public figures and authors. Mobile app trash like this makes me wish there was.

From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this 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 mobile app features simple, fairly basic 2D visuals, and while some effort went into them, and they don't look bad exactly, they don't look great, either. In the 3D era of gaming, that kicked off in the mid 1990's with dedicated 3D GPUs like the S3 Virge and ATI Rage, phoning in the graphics like this isn't going to win any awards or appeal to enthusiast PC gamers.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. 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.

Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.

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

The poor quality of this mobile app 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 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality mobile app is to be expected.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the mobile app... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

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

Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $7 USD, on app stores, it's $3 USD. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay MORE THAN TWICE THE PRICE for a cheap mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this is a mobile app, is priced to insult and gouge PC gamers, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend.

Just who do they think we are?

"Original Logic Puzzles"
Where's the logic? Even with the hints practically spelling our the answers, it's incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to solve these "puzzles" logically.

no

Man kann es zwar auf Deutsch stellen (GER), aber man kann es nicht auf Deutsch lösen. Sollte man vorher wissen...

I don't really like the gameplay. On top it's pretty short (even though it took me a while to get all the achievements) and it doesn't feel that kafkaesque either.

Hin- und hergerissen wie ich dieses Spiel nun bewerten soll...

Ich habe es im Sale erstanden um wenige Cent und da würde ich sagen: voll ok.
Vollpreis würde ich allerdings nicht dafür zahlen.

Die bildliche Gestaltung ist hübsch.
Wirklich mit Kafka hat es nix zu tun, außer, dass der Charakter so heißt und der Detektiv ein menschengroßer Käfer ist...
Die Gestaltung ist generell skurril gehalten.

Die Rätsel fand ich.... frustrierend. Ich habe nicht bei allen einen Hinweis gebraucht, aber bei knapp 90% schon. Ich würde sagen, die Rätsel haben "tarnen und täuschen" verinnerlicht...
Da es sich um Traumsequenzen handelt muss es auch nicht unbedingt logisch sein. Aber gewisse Dinge kann man in ein und demselben Level nicht anwenden.
Bspw. eine Kampfszene: In der ersten Runde geht es darum, dem Gegner den Helm runterzuziehen, sodass er nichts mehr sieht und wir angreifen können. In der zweiten Runde bekommt man dann einen Gegner mit Schild vorgesetzt. Da man ihm das Schild aber nicht wegnehmen kann, greift man mit der Maus einfach seine HP Leiste und zieht sie auf 0. Das hatte ich beim ersten Gegner probiert und hatte dort nicht funktioniert. Beim zweiten aber die korrekte Lösung.
Schieberätsel konnte ich sowieso nie leiden. Das ist für mich die Vorform eines Rubik Cube. Und das Mandala mit seinen Mustern, die eigentlich Zahlen sind, erinnert mich an meine Schulzeit als das Thema optische Täuschung war...

Prinzipiell hab ich keine Ahnung, was genau hier beabsichtigt wurde.

I won this game in a giveaway.

For one 1-hour playthrough, I had fun, but I wouldn't pay more than 2 EUR for this.

My main problem are the puzzles. I'm normally good with puzzles, because normally the difficult part is figuring out the solution. In this game, the difficult part is figuring out what you're supposed to do and which part of the puzzle can you even interact with and what do the interactions mean. It's very confusing and very frustrating.

Not particularly engaging or true to the source material. As a fan of point-and-click games, I would suggest skipping this one.

I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN I HATE THE TRAIN

Creator definitely knows how to draw and animate a bit but not how to create a game or a story.