"One's Own Exile" is one of those "more book than game" efforts with a deluge of high school anime club tier fan-fiction writing centered on the developers imaginary girlfriend and her efforts to escape, and I have to say, if you have an imaginary girlfriend and all she wants to do is escape, that ain't healthy.

What do you do in the game? The minor gameplay elements of this "e-book" are a faithful and authentic, if still garbage looking 1980's 8-bit home PC pixelcrap 2D adventure game, but that's just for segues between the excessive pages of garbage fan-fiction writing. It's mostly clicking past the text as fast as I can to prevent nausea from accidentally reading it. The topic is about the authors imaginary girlfriend and her imaginary struggle against those who repress her identity as an imaginary girlfriend to a failed game developer.

Trying to address serious issues such as mental and emotional health through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good.

The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful.

It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to address mental health issues. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers.

People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get attention/fame by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.

So, it's hard to describe this as a game, the focus is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming rig is not a kindle.

This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.

This game fails on the visuals because of the use of incredibly lazy, ugly pixelcrap. The developer would probably argue this is a "deliberate artistic choice" but we all know it's because the developer was incapable of producing anything better. The game looks very poor compared to professionally developed games. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant, this looks bad because of that developer decision. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's a disservice to gamers when developers don't bother doing their jobs and creating contemporary, high quality visuals. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are rare exceptions that succeeded in spite of their awful graphics. Pixelcrap is never really okay, and there's no excuse for games that look this bad.

Now on to pricing and value for gamers.

This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.

In terms of public reception, the "free" price tag didn't help. This peaked at a handful of players and then immediately cratered. With a peak count of less than 50 gamers (out of over 130 million gamers and over 40 million daily logons), it�s safe to say the PC gaming community has collectively decided to ignore this, probably because of the reasons supplied in this review.

This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?

I can't recommend this, it's not worth downloading even if it's "free". Games don't exist in a vacuum... Steam gamers have literally thousands of better choices.

Finally, I'm here to help save gamers time by filtering out the noise and substandard games. If you don't agree with my assessment of the defects in this game, go ahead and download it... maybe you'll find the same defects to be as unacceptable as I did, maybe not. Even write your own review. Positive or negative, game reviews are here to help other gamers by informing their decisions on what to spend their time on.

Short, well-written, harrowing, and free. I did experience a crash to desktop on a playthrough but it seems rare and once you've "solved" the game a replay is fairly quick.

good stuff