Pirate Software is an indie gamedev streamer who promoted the idea that anyone can make a game with the help of a definitely not fake sultry deep voice. He became the biggest indie game developer creator on all of Twitch and YouTube. However, all of that came crashing down once people figured out that his entire persona was a lie. He claimed to have been working in the gaming industry for over 20 years. The reality is his daddy got him a job in QA at Blizzard and from there he went on to send fishing emails basically asking people politely for the passwords. Obviously that calls into question his supposed expertise. But he is always primarily focused on indie games and he has made an indie game. So who cares if all of his experience at Blizzard is fake? The question we should be asking is, is his indie game any good? I mean, the answer is obviously no, but how bad really is it? It's worse than you could possibly imagine. What made me look into the game in the first place was being shown the code from the game. And I say with no exaggeration, it is the worst I have ever seen. It is baffling in the sense that I genuinely believe it was made bad on purpose. But I'll leave the code review till the end of the video. But just keep that in mind while I'm describing the game that the underlying code is a jumbled mess of incoherent nonsense. So without further ado, subscribe to Lord Frogmire and let's look at this absolute piece of So let's start with going over the gameplay. And we're going to be able to go over literally every single piece of gameplay that is not walking or talking because there is genuinely that little within a single route of the game because that's all I played. You could not pay me $10,000 to play any more of this game. There are exactly three puzzle sections, five total puzzles, and this is being very generous with what I consider a puzzle, by the way. a single combat section, one battle, yes, one that is repeated. So that's two total battles, but only one unique fight and two mini games. That's it. If you want to be extremely generous, there is one more miniame puzzle. Literally, all you do is click on a couple objects. Yes, that's literally it, but technically that's better than just walking and talking. This was a Kickstarter game, by the way. A Kickstarter game that advertised its combat, which its only unique combat encounter was advertised in the Kickstarter campaign that was funded in 2017 and raised $20,000. So, in 8 years, he could not make a single combat encounter that he advertised as a primary part of the game with $20,000, let alone all of the sales the game got once it was released in early access. So, while I'm going over the very limited gameplay that actually exists in the game, remember that this was a Kickstarter scam that was advertised as a real RPG with real gameplay. Okay, so our first section of gameplay is a log pushing puzzle. Yes, this is how generous I was being when I said there were five puzzles in the game. I don't think there's really anything to discuss here because if there wasn't so few gameplay sections to begin with, no one would ever mention this. Okay, now we have the first and only unique combat encounter that was shown in the Kickstarter trailer. It is a warrior miniame compilation and is perfectly serviceable for a tutorial encounter. Not all of the combat in the entire game. All it is is four very simple micro games where if you succeed, the enemy takes damage and if you fail, you take damage. That's it. Perfectly serviceable, but very simple, very basic. This encounter is about 1 minute long. And remember, that is one of two encounters that are in the game. From here, we now have three puzzles in a row. Only one more puzzle exists in the game after this. And if I wasn't being so generous, I wouldn't call them puzzles at all. And I don't mean that they're easy. Do you remember those little things that babies use where it's a circle hole and a circle block and a triangle hole and a triangle block? That's what I would call an easy puzzle. What makes it a puzzle is you still have options. You could up and try and put the triangle block in the circle hole. That's not what these puzzles are. These you have a square hole and a square block and literally nothing else. You cannot fail these. There is only one option. If you try the only possible thing, you will complete the puzzle. Look at this first puzzle. You can only push these blocks and nothing else. You can only push those blocks in one direction. Nowhere else. And that's all you have to do. push those two blocks in the only places they can possibly go and you have now completed the puzzle. And you might say maybe that's just to teach you the mechanics, but it doesn't get better from there. Puzzle number two, all you can interact with are the switches. There is nothing else you can do. All you have to do is keep activating switches until you win. You could close your eyes. You do not have to think. There is no fail state. You just hit the switches until you succeed. Hit every switch to complete the puzzle. That's what I'm talking about when I say it's square peg and square hole. All you have to do is try and you succeed. As long as you are engaging with the game at all, you're moving forward. There is no thought necessary at all. That's why don't consider it a puzzle. There is no triangle block for you to put in the square hole. And puzzle number three is literally the exact same thing as puzzle number one. All you have to do is push the only blocks that you could possibly push in the only direction they will possibly go. Then you flip the switches and you've succeeded. Literally no thought whatsoever. It's not a puzzle, but I'm being generous, so we'll give it to them. There are now four puzzles in the game and you see the quality. One combat encounter, four puzzles. We're almost done with all of the gameplay, by the way. game play that was in the game in 2017. After this, you get the final combat encounter in the entire game, which is the exact same fight as before, except this time you get to fight him for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. So that means in this game that has been developed for over 8 years, there is 3 minutes and 30 seconds of combat, $20,000, by the way. Do you feel scammed yet? Well, we still have one more puzzle and two mini games to go, so save your judgment. This last puzzle is the only thing I would even consider a puzzle in the game. And all it is is you're searching a room for clues to a fourdigit code. Yep, that's it. But it is a puzzle. You do have to try and figure out what the numbers are. So, I'll give it to him. The game has a one real puzzle. And the best part about it is you can just skip it. If you don't want to do it, the game tells you you can just input seven ones and it'll let you through anyway. Who knows what the punishment is for that, but I'm sure it doesn't matter. I did actually do the puzzle, though, cuz I wanted to experience all this game had to offer. Was it worth it? Honestly, at this point, yes, it was, cuz at least I got to play some video game in my video game. Okay, moving on. We're almost done. On to the first miniame of only two, so it better be worth it. It is a game in which you get a picture of either a sandwich or a soda and then you have to give them the sandwich or soda in the order they ask for. So if they ask for soda sandwich, you give them a soda, then you give them a sandwich. They ask for sandwich, you give them a sandwich and then a sandwich. Does this sound fun? Does it sound interesting? Does it sound like it took 8 years to make? And that's half. Half of all of the mini games in this video game is this. Just soak it in for a second. I want you to burn this into your mind. Cuz when we move on to talk about the code and how bad it is, I want you to keep in mind what he's coding, like what he's doing this for. Think to yourself, could this be done in RPG Maker? so far, except the one and only combat encounter. There is nothing here that could not be done in RPG Maker with literally no coding at all. But maybe this last miniame will change my mind. It'll truly blow everything else out of the water. Nope. It's just as bad as everything else. Come on, what did you expect? This is something that you make for your first game. It is one step beyond Hello World. It is a game in which you must dodge falling objects. Yes, I know you're technically supposed to be running forward, but programming wise, that's literally all it is. You're dodging falling objects while trying to hit the object you want. That's it. There's nothing else to it. This is something you teach a middle schooler how to do for their very first coding class, and that's all of the gameplay in the whole game. And looking at all this, I just don't get it. Like, I'm genuinely confused. When Pirate Software told everyone that he worked on video games for 20 years, that he worked as a hacker. Why did anyone believe him when this was what he was putting out? Why did it take this long for people to call him out for being a fraud when this is his magnumopus? That took him 8 years, 8 years of perfecting your craft for something a middle schooler could make. This isn't the work of a professional. This isn't even the work of an amateur. It's pathetic. The worst part is after scamming his own fans out of $20,000 and more, he has the balls to bait you into thinking there was another boss fight. You are seconds away from fighting an enemy literally called boss and it fakes you out with a fake battle screen only to give a shitty chrono triggeresque judgment segment where you hurt the boss by making good decisions. This is what I'm talking about where I say it's baffling that it's taken this long for someone to call this guy out. He's been literally scamming and with his own fans for years. But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's time to talk about the story. And that was clearly the focus of the game because the game play is only about, and I'm being very generous here, 10 minutes. So, the rest of this entire game is walking around and talking to NPCs. So, is the writing good? I mean, come on. That's not even a rhetorical at this point, cuz I know you're not asking it. Obviously, it's bad. Of course, it's bad. But compared to the game play, it's not that bad. I would describe it as general 13-year-old girl writing. Like maybe something you'd see on someone's Tumblr fanfiction account, like about that level. There are a couple really cringy lines of dialogue that are funny. Like he unironically says sad armadillo noises, but it doesn't really get any more interesting than that. The real problem with the story of this game is the same problem you see in any teenage writing. That the game never gives you a reason to care about anything. Going back to that fake out boss fight, this is a boss fight where it's revealed that it's your mom, that you have mommy issues, and you defeat her by proving that you're not like her, where she accuses you of being evil, and then it checks your previous actions to see if they line up with her beliefs. And if you defied her and were a good person, you defeat her. It's clearly supposed to be a big emotional moment. The problem is, we have no reason to care about any of this because before this exchange, there's literally only one encounter with your mom that you weren't even there for. It's a flashback of your mom talking to your dad where she calls you lazy and the dad pathetic. That's it. There's nothing else. There is no other reason to believe the mom is even abusive, let alone so evil that we had to have a boss fight about it. And that's not even the worst part where she chastises you for your decisions. They include decisions you didn't even make. She accuses you of killing this character when I didn't even have the option. If I knew I could kill that character, I probably would have. It would have been funny. So when she's like, "Oh, I bet you killed that guy." and you're like, "No, I would never do that." Except I would. I would totally do that. I just never got the option. It doesn't show good moral character to just not press A on every possible thing. And the worst example of the game failing to make you care about something is the whole point of the game. The reason why you're doing everything in the center of your character is that your dog dies. Your talking dog who's your best friend dies and you must go save him. Sort of. Yeah, it really seems like he's dead forever. But that's what you're trying to do is save him. The problem being you literally only spend the first five minutes of the game with the dog. Why in the should I care about this dog? I've spent no time with him. I know nothing about him. I know they're friends. That's it. That's like someone going up to you and being like, "Hey, my neighbor's brother's daughter's dog died. Isn't that sad?" And you'd be like, "Yeah, I guess so." Yeah, that's sad. That sucks, but I don't care. It doesn't make me want to play this whole game and fight for whatever. You have to get me to care about this. Show me how the dog helped him deal with his abusive mother. You have to show me that. This is literally firstgrade writing, by the way, by a 40-year-old man. Yes, this game that looks like it was made by a teenage girl and is written like it was made by a teenage girl was made by a 37year-old man. I mean, there really isn't anything else to talk about the story. Nothing happens. The real problem is the game doesn't have real characters. They're all just caricatures. The only character that has more than a handful of lines is the main character. And the only thing I know about him is that he cares about his dog, and he has an abusive mother. Maybe he's a bit sarcastic sometimes. I don't even know what he likes, what he dislikes, what does he have fun doing, how does he feel about things. Is he right-wing? Is he leftwing? How would he feel about the Federal Reserve? I don't know. I don't know anything about him. And I actually read every piece of mandatory dialogue. It's not like I was just skipping through things. The game is just so busy trying to make funny lines that are profoundly cringe that it never tries to say anything about anything. Actually, it does try and make one statement. It does have a line about how in the corporate world, you never go up. You only go sideways. No, Thor, that's just you. And it's because you're bad. No one was ever going to promote you out of QA when you can't program, you can't write, and you're clearly an idiot. And what doesn't help the story is how much you know he's holding back. And for no reason, another very common novice writer mistake is focusing too much on the reveal and not enough on the buildup. After your dog dies, you're feeling constant guilt where it's like, "Ah, it's your fault. You killed the dog." And it doesn't make any sense because how the dog dies is you're just asleep and you wake up and the dog is dead. It has nothing to do with you. A monster killed it while you were asleep. It couldn't possibly be your fault. So clearly there is some kind of reveal later in the game where the dog died for a real reason and the monster's not real or something like that because as it is now, it doesn't make any sense. I have no reason to be like, I killed this dog. I didn't do anything and neither did the kid. and there's no reason for him to feel this way. It just doesn't make sense. So, the story is bad, the game play's bad. What else is there? What could possibly make this game worth playing? Well, one of the big selling points is the multiple routes that all of your decisions matter. I've already told you I only played one route, the good route. And if you've listened to a single word I've said so far, you know exactly why. But let me tell you now, the decision-making is just as bad as the rest of the game. You literally have an evil voice telling you which is the bad option and which is the good option. It is literally as overt as listen to this character's problems and be nice or kill them. And just in case, it's slightly more subtle than hitting you in the back of the head with a sledgehammer. You have the evil voice in your head telling you what the evil option is. No, the choices obviously don't matter because being forced to play this game again is a form of cruel and unusual punishment. But that's the whole game. That's it. And why do you think there is so little? Probably because there's only one completed chapter. Yes, that's it. You have one chapter about who knows, maybe half of chapter 2. Maybe it's 75%. I have no idea how much more there could be. And then the very opening of chapter 3. That's all that's completed in 8 years. He's completed one chapter of an unplayably bad game. So yeah, maybe there's more character development in the rest of the game. And maybe they'll make me really care about that dead dog. But I have the strangest feeling that none of that's ever going to happen. That the game is never going to be finished because at this rate, it's going to take him the rest of his life. He will die before this game is completed. So, is the game worth playing? No. Is it bad? Obviously, this is something a teenage girl makes for a school project in RPG Maker, not something made by a nearly 40year-old man on a threeperson team. Now, it's finally time to talk about the code. Now that you have the full context, you can understand not only why is this bad, but why it was completely unnecessary. Because the entire game could be made with no coding at all in RPG Maker. 99% of the game is just walking around and talking to people. RPG Maker games with no RPG elements that are just walking and talking have been made since the beginning of time. this game would actually be better if it was made in RPG Maker because he up something as simple as just showing text on the screen. How the game works is you leftclick to enter dialogue. Then if you're going to progress the text, which you're going to have to do if you can read at a first grade level, you must then rightclick. Then if you want to move on to the next text box, you can't rightclick. You have to leftclick again. So just reading is this song and dance of left click, right click, left click, left click, right click, left click. Do you see how that might get annoying really fast? Or if you as bored as I was, it's the only fun part of the game. Anyway, there you go. That's it. This is the code I wanted to talk about. No, it's not the 1,000 element switch statement. Yes, that's real. No, it's not the array of flags with 560 elements all listed out in a row. Yes, that exists also. It's just this. Now, if you've never coded before, you might not understand why this is so bad. That this was so shocking that it made me create this video. Let me start by explaining what a switch is. The switch is a form of go to, cuz literally all it does is go to a section of code. That's it. In this case, we take the argument global.storyline array 333. God, that is insane to say, by the way. And based on what that value is, we go to that case. So if the value is one, we go to case one. If the value is 2, we go to case 2. And this doesn't have to be in order. You could have case 333 and then case 12 right after that. You can do whatever you want. It's just whatever the value is, we go to the case that has that value. Now, the much simpler version of this is an if statement. All an if statement is is if whatever is in those parentheses is true, then we do what's in that block. Now that you understand those two things, you are now a better programmer than our hacker genius here. Because what you see here is complete absurdity. He does not know the purpose of an if statement or a switch or how to use them. I'm going to give you one second to see what is wrong with the switch. All right, you ready? Why is it not an if? Why is there code that even says do nothing? Want to know how you do nothing in code? You just don't write it. So, if we delete case 2, again, there's nothing there. There's nothing to do. If we just got rid of it, it'd be exactly the same. We are now left with a switch that has a singular case. So, what that means is we check what is the value of our global whatever the If it is one, we go to case one and there is nothing else to check because there are no other cases. Do you see the problem? Now, we could literally just write this as an if statement. And what's the peak absurdity is that's literally what he did directly above this. So, he did it right then immediately did it wrong right after. And even then, it's still not correct. I'll give you one more programming concept. There's something called a bool. That is what the if statement is checking for. It's checking for a boolean. A boolean is either true or false. However, that can also be represented as a number where zero is false and everything else is true. So in this if statement, he's asking is global array whatever the equal to one. Do you see the problem there? He literally has a comment confirming that what is in that array is a boolean. So there is no reason to be checking for anything. All you do is put global.stoline array 367 and then end it there and it works exactly the same. And then he could just do the exact same thing right below that global.stoline array 333 and then end it there. No switch statement, no nothing, just an if. And I'm not even going to talk about how both of those blocks of code are literally doing the exact same thing. Both of them are only calling instance destroyed. So you could literally do an or there and then you can combine all of it into one line. And this is the point. This is why it makes me mad because he wants his code to be big. That's the point. I've seen a bunch of code reviews on his code. two very great videos about this, but I had to make this video cuz they don't point out what's important is he's doing this intentionally. He's clearly doing this to make himself look smarter because his dumb fans who don't know how to code look at that and think, "Wo, look at all that code. He must be a genius." He thinks more code equals better code because he's an idiot and his fans are stupid, too. Look at here. I'll just give you one more example. Look at this. Do you see how it's a list of things where he's literally doing the exact same thing every time? All of this could be done a single for loop. Yes, just one loop. Literally, all for loop is is we do one thing over and over again until we hit the number of repetitions we want. And we can increment by any amount we want. In this case, we would definitely increment by one. And the cool thing is we get access to that incrementer. So we don't have to write the number every single time. But do you see the problem with that is he would have less code and then it would look less cool. He wants these giant blocks of code. He's an idiot. He's dumb. He thinks big blocks of code means he's doing a lot of work. What a Can you imagine him just typing out over and over and over again, line after line after line of the exact same thing, being like, "Man, I guess there's no better way of doing this. Maybe he's that stupid." Honestly, he probably is. But at least part of it has to be him trying to look cool with these giant chunks of text. That's why he doesn't use loops. That's why he uses a switch statement when he could use an if. That's why he's checking if true equals true. Yes, that's literally what this means. What he's typing here is is true equals true. That's why he refuses to write true or false instead of zero or one because numbers look cooler than true or false. That's why he refuses to use functions and will literally just repeat the exact same steps over and over again. It's because he wants to look cool. He's a child. Everything in this video so far can be explained by the fact that he is a manchild. He is a 37-year-old teenage girl. He codes like a teenager. He writes like a teenager. And he makes big exaggerated lies just like a teenager. And just like a teenager, he will never admit when he's wrong. And that's why this entire controversy happened. It has nothing to do with Stop Killing Games. It has nothing to do with him letting his friends die in World of Warcraft. It's that he's a child who refuses to grow up. And if you give a child millions of dollars and a ton of attention, they will up eventually. And he'll never learn. You just know he'll never learn. You don't get to 37 acting like a child and even have the capability of learning. And I want to make it very clear, there is nothing wrong with writing bad code. There's nothing wrong with making a bad game. There's nothing wrong with writing embarrassing dialogue. The problem with Pirate Software and why he is being mocked endlessly is he acts like an expert when he's worse than a novice. And the only reason he's this bad after working on a game for 8 years is because he already thinks he's perfect. When you think you're perfect, you have no reason to learn anymore. You should not be afraid of failing, of making shitty things. What you should be afraid of is not learning from it. But that's just a theory, a game theory. Thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe to Lord Frogmire. It is only thanks to my stream chat that I made this video in the first place. Maybe next stream we can go over all of his code. I'm sure people would love to see me tortured. Anyway, bye.