Lovecraft's Untold Stories 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 is yet another insult to the estate of HP Lovecraft as once more his corpse is exhumed to be abused by garbage games ripping off his public domain works. This time the mobile app devs even went so far as to try make it look like this was officially the work of Lovecraft, but it's not... the garbage content here (such as it is) is obviously not the "unfinished" work of Lovecraft. This is highly disrespectful, but what do we expect from mobile devs dumping their trash on Steam?

This mobile app is a really mediocre pixelcrap 2D top down shooter/brawler with little to nothing going for it (I'm sure the mobile gamers were super impressed for 5 minutes before going back to Angry Birds, which also happens to have better graphics than this).

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

A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.

While there are options to change the resolution for the mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the mobile app, 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.

While the graphics look okay, the developer weirdly decided to prevent you from scrolling through all the resolution options you can get... now, if you have a modern GPU, you'll probably get a bunch of resolution options, the low res options are the only options that appear, because the developer decided there's no need for you to scroll through the resolutions available to you. The upshot? You can't set the game to your monitor native resolution. Now, if you're gaming on a CRT, that's fine... but come on, everyone uses a fixed resolution LCD or OLED monitor nowadays. That kind of screwup from the developer isn't acceptable.

The mobile app features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the mobile app, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the mobile app doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content.

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 mobile app 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 mobile app 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.

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 $15 USD, on app stores, it's $5. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a THREE TIMES THE PRICE FOR A 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.

FIFTEEN BUCKS for a mobile app and they couldn't even do the graphics properly... no pixelcrap game is worth that much, let alone a mobile app.

Just who do they think we are?