The description of “Share” on Steam is a little weird. It seems to have been translated from some other language. The gist that I got seemed interesting enough, so I decided to take a look. I know that’s not much of an introduction, but “Share” does not seem to exist in any sort of context. It’s just floating there on Steam without any sort of marketing push or anything. I had literally never heard of this game before, and that intrigued me. So here we go.
“Share” begins with the player crashing a car in the middle of the woods, presumably somewhere in Eastern Europe, judging by the music playing on the car’s radio. After this, the player character finds a nearby house and apparently decides to break in. This plot greatly confused me. Is this a thing in Eastern Europe? Do people just walk into the houses of complete strangers? Like, there really needs to be some sort of intro text or cut scene here because this does not make a bit of sense. Then you follow a cat that leads you to a windmill. Then you cut up some branches that were stuck in the windmill (which is probably like twenty feet above the treeline), and then you have to take your car battery and charge it (since that is clearly the problem with a crashed car) but you have to turn off all the lights in the house so that there will be enough electricity to charge the battery. I don’t think that electricity works that way. After that there are some monsters and stuff, but at no point does this game even begin to make sense.
“Share” is a game made with Unity, which should probably give you a rough idea of how it looks. It features very bulky models and really bad textures. And like many bad unity games, it features a lot of stolen images. There are a variety of pictures hanging up or in frames around the unexplained house in the middle of nowhere (complete with dog in a doghouse). These pictures seem to be the result of a Google image search for “creepy.” It includes things like the poster art for “The Grudge” and a still from the film “Begotten.” I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the developers did not bother to actually pay to use these copyrighted images. I ordinarily like to talk about monster design for horror games, but the only phrase I can think of to describe the monsters of “Share” is “unintentionally hilarious.” One last note about the visual aspects of the game: when moving, the player character’s limbs seem to just flail around almost at random.
The audio element of “Share” is among the most annoying I have ever encountered. After exiting the program, I could only remember two things about the game’s sound. The first is that it played some kind of decent licensed music in the initial scene where the player is driving the car prior to crashing it. The other is that there is a cat meowing and it gets so incredibly annoying. In fact, I had to reach a bit to remember the music from the car scene. My initial thought of “How was the audio?” was internally answered by an unending stream of meows.
“Share” plays like a game made by someone who heard about survival horror games but has never actually played any of them. The path through the game does not make sense. The puzzles do not make sense. It is possible to find some of the “monsters” (quotation marks added because they do not deserve that word) dead without ever encountering them alive.
There is literally nothing worthwhile in “Share.” I do not think that I have been quite as gobsmacked by the sheer awfulness of a game since “Emily Wants To Play.” There can be some good games made with Unity (see literally anything designed by David Szymanski). This is just not one of them.
