Idle gaming has been one of the most surprising breakout areas of the past few years, even though the genre’s name is a misnomer. In the beginning, these games are often in a dormant state, where you click frantically until you reach a point where the game starts to play on its own. The current, plastic duck simulator really To be an idle game: you have to do absolutely nothing but watch some plastic ducks floating in the pool. And I’m here to tell you that this is one of the highest rated games on Steam.
As first reported by excellence GameDiscoverCo news, PPDS‘s popularity on Steam isn’t surreal. More logically, it’s been a string of spikes since its initial release in July of this year. Since then, the barely interactive game has received more than 3,500 “Extremely Positive” reviews on Steam, currently recording an almost unprecedented rate of 98% positive reviews. And why? um…
To some extent, this is really nothing more than watching rubber ducks float in a blandly rendered backyard pool. At first you have a yellow duck, but when the duck meter on the screen is full, new ducks fall from the sky. These have their own design, can have headbands or hats and pipes, or they can be cleverly disguised as a sprinkled donut.
Your interaction is limited to clumsily moving the camera around, circling a selected duck. The scenery gently undulates with the water, while the peaceful background sounds of birds chirping and blowing wind create a mediocre sound. (Or you can turn on that awful music you shouldn’t be playing.)
G/O Media can receive commission
The thing is, it took more effort than it deserved, and even though I was ready to roll my eyes and turn it off, it’s been running on my desktop for a few hours now. There’s a day/night cycle, with features of a two-tiered pool that lights up at night and the soundtrack naturally shifts to cicadas. Outside the pool is the ocean, and if you look closely, you can see a school of dolphins swimming past. Oh, and of course there’s the DLC that adds more samples of the growing number of ducks.
All of this was created by the Italian developers Tunnel Vision Studio as a silly foray into the development of their matching game, the open world survival sim sand star. It was part of an internal game breakdown at the studio, GameDiscoverCo reports that they have done “zero marketing”. Due to attention from several major Japanese and Korean Twitter accounts, and then a few weeks ago from YouTube account 2.75 million RTGame subscribersIt constantly captures people’s attention and imagination.
The fact that it only costs $2 could be a big part of its evaluation success. It’s hard to sweetly refuse something stupid when it’s priced so low, and no matter how much I want to be skeptical, I can’t stop double-checking which ducks have arrived, and I’m back. so inexplicable excitement when a small plane flew over it once. Also, on one occasion, I don’t understand why, one of my ducks escaped with a propeller on his head and drifted into the sea.
Ducks actually behave differently, even if it really means slightly differently. I wonder if simply saving the player almost absolutely everything about a game makes the little leftovers that much more important. Either way, I find that I can’t argue with the reviews it’s received. It’s ridiculous, and it deserves 98% of the positivity usually given to things like Half life 2 or Stardew Valley.
Here is more information:
