@traders posted the review, score at bottom. 2 hours before market closes 👀 https://steamcommunity.com/id/ShynyMagikarp/recommended/1321440?snr=1_5_9__402

@No_uh interesting review. The decision to eschew any comparison with Pokemon was a brave one. It shows a commitment to speaking to fans of the monster-battler genre.

Personally, as someone who hasn’t played Temtem, I would have appreciated at least the perfunctory comparison with Pokemon. (and really, how much has Pokemon changed even since Red/Blue?)

The point about the story was interesting, but not quite committal enough to make it a lynchpin of the recommendation. It feels as though it’s a ‘nice to have’, rather than a key drawcard.

Overall, the review gives me some insight into the differences in the monster battler genre, and in that sense I’ve come away from it enriched.

I’ll give the review an 8.0/10.

@OP Ha! 8/10. I really appreciate you taking the time to write that. It means a lot.

I think if I were a YouTube essayist and the complete purpose of these was for an audience then I would've said even more. But ultimately I write these up for myself, and post them anyway because sometimes there are great comments and thoughts shared by others here like you :) and sometimes games on steam are desperately lacking substantive reviews to help buyers.....

I like your framing of the story part :) And yes, Pokemon feels so stagnant. I wonder if their extra long (by their standards) gap before the new Legends ZA (or whatever) game will really show us a true formula shakeup!

By the way I'll get around to making a Google Sheets because I might make another market like this or the one I did for Balatro sometime soon.

@No_uh Like you I imagine, if someone’s put effort into creating something for others, I feel it deserves consideration.

Honestly, the marketisation of the review score is an ingenious way to drive deep engagement. It encourages market participants to engage in all your work for success, and by the time the review gets posted, they’re emotionally invested enough to engage with it (after rapidly adjusting their positions, of course).

One potential way to further drive deep engagement would be to post the review, sans score, a day before updating with the score proper. That way you encourage people to think over the review itself to identify the grading.

I’m not going to say you should do video essays or anything, and I don’t know to what extent this strategy works at driving broader engagement (vs deep engagement from a few players), but I feel it may have the seeds of something bigger.

Is there a way to sort your review by score? Do you have a distribution of those scores?

@OP Sadly, no. Not as of now. I can make a Google Sheets of them though, and add to it over time, but I won't be able to put that together until after closure date for time reasons.

@traders I was getting a little nervous I wouldn't finish in time because the story was growing wider than I expected, but I had an extra long sesh on a holiday today and I just finished!

I'll be jotting down my thoughts over the next little while, and will likely post the review (with score) on Steam before market close, so any keen watchers can scoop up some loose mana if you're fast ;)

@traders I'm extending the close date for this market by two weeks. I was unable to play games for the majority of November for real-life reasons, but also since the end of November I've been quite distracted by other games.

The former you should not take as evidence that the game is not so fun, but the latter you should use as evidence for how much I'm enjoying the game.


As always, you can ask questions about my gaming likes and dislikes, and see my playtime tracked via my Steam (linked in the description).