The Hidden and Unknown - The $2000 game on Steam

The twist is that the self-published game is purposefully shorter than two hours, which means it can be finished without exceeding Steam’s playtime limit for no-questions-asked refunds.

“I do not wish to get any people into financial trouble,” ThePro said. “I just price my game as it feels right to me, which is my right.”

The Hidden and Unknown begins with an eight-minute-long Star Wars scroll which describes an imbalance between masculine and feminine energy that’s turning Western men infertile due to testosterone depletion, causing women to become increasingly masculine, and which will ultimately lead to the end of humanity.

After introducing a time-traveling AI entity which perfectly balances the masculine (“thinking”) and feminine (“feeling”) energies, the dogmatic preamble gives way to a less confident, mostly non-interactive visual novel about a kid named Brian. None of the characters are depicted visually, only the locations, which have obviously been created with help from an AI image generator.

That is…something

The price is against the law (~price gouging?), at least here in Germany. I wonder why Steam is so negligent with such things. Other than that: Well, he made it, he got his articles. : \

I’ll wait for the Steam sale, hopefully it’ll be 35% off.

And then refund it.

The game sounds horrible. I think you would need to pay me $2,000 to take the time to play a visual novel.

or maybe they will offer 35% more time to finish before they refuse to refund it :)

Neil Breen is making videogames now?

It’s actually not a bad scam, in an era of Supreme branded bricks selling for $50. If he ends up selling a hundred copies that don’t get returned he’ll have made more than most unknown indie devs. By gloaming onto the Incel adjacent political topics there might well be a hundred suckers out there.

You know, if there are people around who actually think that’s true, maybe we deserve extinction.

One person’s penis-shrinking warlock shibboleth is another’s Y-chromosome degradation

and long-term it may be worse

Apples and oranges, my dude. Apples and oranges.

And life, uh, finds a way.

This is dumb and like the first year of the App Store again. It’s just for attention for a worthless product.