The Kangaroo Conspiracy

A fairly short game which takes about 5 or more hours to 100% - half of the game is a platformer with short levels & the other half a visual novel. This game appears to be niche & based on a movie which was based on a book - if you're not familiar with either of those (which I wasn't until I played this game & looked them up) the jokes could miss. The game is satirical in nature with conspiracy theories & never takes itself seriously. There are several pop culture references added in aswell. It would have been a nice addition if it had a skip button for the dialogue when you replay a level. Overall the experience I had was slightly under average.

https://youtu.be/ua_z2l3mKu8 German humor may not be a wide enough cultural touchstone to make up for the otherwise below average action platformer elements.

The Kangaroo Conspiracy is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This particularly badly made platformer is from Germany, is badly translated from German, and is apparently a "meta" game about some crappy film or something... it's not great for gamers to have weird fringe fan-fictions nobody gets shoved at them on Steam, especially when they lack any real value as serious PC games. The game's story follows Marc-Uwe and the Kangaroo as they are sucked into a conspiracy and also, a computer game, where they must fight their way out while battling conspiracy theorists and their own meta-commentary. This is cringey and badly written, and is accompanied by weak puzzle platforming and a slew of technical defects we'll get into shortly. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. 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. 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. To make matters worse, while lazy, low quality pixel "art" has been used, making the game look bad, many elements of the game aren't done with pixelcrap... which accomplishes a couple of things. First, it shows the developers perhaps could have done better and they knew it, so that's a major screwup. Secondly, it destroys any hopes the developer had of creating a "retro aesthetic" as their excuse for the lazy pixelart compromise... It looks completely inauthentic from a retro gaming perspective. Visually, this is a hamfisted mess, a dogs breakfast of bad visuals, and this kind of laziness and poor quality should never be foisted on gamers. 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 controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam? The Kangaroo Conspiracy has the far too high price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. The quality problems and defects with this game makes the asking price totally unrealistic. It is impossible to recommend this to gamers here on Steam. For c…