I had a great time with Seven: The Days Long Gone. Not playing it, because it’s about as poorly designed as the lowest of low-budget titles. The great time I had with this title was reading its Steam store page, where it proudly displays a review from reputable German gaming site GameStar, who had this to say: “The game includes an appealing graphic and a compelling story which gains more and more depth throughout the end. In a cyberpunk scenario!” That’s right! An appealing graphic! A cyberpunk scenario! These are the depths to which the developers of Seven are willing to stoop for positive attention, and who can blame them? The game is a mess. It looks awful (not an appealing graphic to be seen), the voice acting seems to have been entirely by a single extra from a bad British TV drama, and most importantly, it’s not fun. It wants to be a variety of things, amongst them a top-down stealth game and an action RPG, but it doesn’t want to be these things enough to conjure even the thinnest understanding of what makes either of those things good. The Wikipedia page (which I assume was written by the developers themselves) compares it to Assassin’s Creed and Thief, and if you’ve never played either of those things you might think those are reasonable comparisons, but really all it has in common with Assassin’s Creed is that you can climb on rooftops and all it has in common with Thief is that you play as a thief.

A thief named Teriel, specifically, who lives in the hastily established low-fantasy Vetrall Empire and is sent to the prison island of Peh after a dramatic cutscene which I couldn’t get to play no matter how many times I tried. What I understood was that we acquired some sort of ghostly companion who guides us through various trials and tribulations - unfortunately, I didn’t have a ghostly companion to guide me through the trial that was using the actual controls, which feel loose and slippery and are in no way fit to use for any sort of combat or stealth, both of which it wants you to engage in regularly. I don’t know if Teriel has some sort of disability that was established in the incredibly long loading screens, but regardless, he handles with all the elegance and grace of a small car and has the personality to match. I’ll admit I didn’t get far into Seven, but I refuse to feel bad about this - it seems like the developers also didn’t get far into it before realising that they could just get a variety of knock-off news sites to give them good reviews and establish the bare minimum of gameplay to have pretty screenshots for the store page rather than put in the actual work required.

Seven is a slapdash indie attempt to look like a triple-A title but without the attached talent to get the job done. It was a failure from the concept stage and it seems that whoever did the bulk of the work wasn’t given a clear focus to work with and so we have this disaster; a game so bad that these three paragraphs would be more appropriately considered a warning than a review. Maybe if you’re really into bad cockney accents you’ll get some fun out of this, but all I can say is that my days with Seven are long gone. Bam.

PS: At the time of writing I didn’t realise that the developers were trying to sell this product for AUD $41.95. In light of this, I’d like to add to my review a lengthy audio clip of myself laughing, but as this feature is unavailable on Steam as of this time, this text description will have to suffice.

I had a great time with [i]Seven: The Days Long Gone[/i]. Not playing it, because it’s about as poorly designed as the lowest of low-budget titles. The great time I had with this title was reading its Steam store page, where it proudly displays a review from reputable German gaming site [i]GameStar[/i], who had this to say: “The game includes an appealing graphic and a compelling story which gains more and more depth throughout the end. In a cyberpunk scenario!” That’s right! An appealing graphic! A cyberpunk scenario! These are the depths to which the developers of [i]Seven[/i] are willing to stoop for positive attention, and who can blame them? The game is a [i]mess[/i]. It looks awful (not an appealing graphic to be seen), the voice acting seems to have been entirely by a single extra from a bad British TV drama, and most importantly, it’s not fun. It wants to be a variety of things, amongst them a top-down stealth game and an action RPG, but it doesn’t want to be these things enough to conjure even the thinnest understanding of what makes either of those things good. The Wikipedia page (which I assume was written by the developers themselves) compares it to [i]Assassin’s Creed[/i] and [i]Thief[/i], and if you’ve never played either of those things you might think those are reasonable comparisons, but really all it has in common with [i]Assassin’s Creed[/i] is that you can climb on rooftops and all it has in common with [i]Thief[/i] is that you play as a thief. A thief named Teriel, specifically, who lives in the hastily established low-fantasy Vetrall Empire and is sent to the prison island of Peh after a dramatic cutscene which I couldn’t get to play no matter how many times I tried. What I understood was that we acquired some sort of ghostly companion who guides us through various trials and tribulations - unfortunately, I didn’t have a ghostly companion to guide me through the trial that was using the actual controls, which feel loose and slippery and are in no way fit to use for any sort of combat or stealth, both of which it wants you to engage in regularly. I don’t know if Teriel has some sort of disability that was established in the incredibly long loading screens, but regardless, he handles with all the elegance and grace of a small car and has the personality to match. I’ll admit I didn’t get far into [i]Seven[/i], but I refuse to feel bad about this - it seems like the developers also didn’t get far into it before realising that they could just get a variety of knock-off news sites to give them good reviews and establish the bare minimum of gameplay to have pretty screenshots for the store page rather than put in the actual work required. [i]Seven[/i] is a slapdash indie attempt to [i]look[/i] like a triple-A title but without the attached talent to get the job done. It was a failure from the concept stage and it seems that whoever did the bulk of the work wasn’t given a clear focus to work with and so we have this disaster; a game so bad that these three paragraphs would be more appropriately considered a warning than a review. Maybe if you’re [i]really[/i] into bad cockney accents you’ll get some fun out of this, but all I can say is that my days with [i]Seven[/i] are long gone. Bam. [i]PS: At the time of writing I didn’t realise that the developers were trying to sell this product for AUD $41.95. In light of this, I’d like to add to my review a lengthy audio clip of myself laughing, but as this feature is unavailable on Steam as of this time, this text description will have to suffice.[/i]