Victoria Clair 41 Reviews

Reacting to My Negative Reviews

Feb 22, 2025

Victoria Clair thinking

About Victoria Clair

In 2020, I made a short puzzle game and put it on Steam. I did everything myself besides the music, which I paid a friend to do. My goal was to finish something, just to see what it would be like to take a game all the way from the "just an idea" stage to release to post-launch bugfixing. People often say the hardest part abotu creative work is just sticking with it and finishing something—Victoria Clair was a personal challenge for me to commit to a project and see it through.

So, I still consider Victoria Clair to have been a huge success. It met the goal that I had set for it: existing. As the first game I ever made, that was a big deal for me!

The Reviews

I "launched" Victoria Clair with literally zero marketing, as it wasn't ever really the goal to have anhyone play it. I put it on Steam because I thought that it would be valuable to familizarize myself with Steamworks' backend interface and to learn how to integrate Steam achievements (spoiler: this was, indeed, super useful for me to know!).

Discussion board

Nevertheless, people found it—somehow—and played it. If you search "Victoria Clair" on Youtube, there are a few Let's Plays, and someone even wrote up a whole walkthrough and posted it under the "Guides" community feature tab on Steam. But what we're looking at today is the reviews.

Victoria Clair 41 Reviews

Victoria Clair currently has 41 reviews on Steam. Not bad! I was honestly expecting zero, maybe one or two from my friends.

Victoria Clair review chart

The game got 6 negative reviews, but some of them are no longer accessible. I don't know why. They just don't show up. Anyway, I'll just react to them, because they're entertaining.

The Negative Reviews

Negative review

This review is very fair, clearly this person jsut wasn't a fan of the puzzles. The puzzles are... not great. They vary wildly in quality and most of them are pretty "math-y."

Of the negative reviews, I only received two in English. I don't have a screenshot of the other negative review in English—I literally just can't access it anymore. If you go and click on the red bar on the graph where it should be, it doesn't show up. If you sort by "Negative Reviews Only" and clear all other filters, it doesn't show up. But I remember what it said. The person was really upset because there's a twist at the end of the game and they really didn't like the twist. I remember thinknig to myself that I considered that review a compliment because it meant that I got someone to care. And I'd much rather have people feel strongly, even it's it's negative, about my writing than to be boring and have them not care at all. If it's boring, people won't care if you mess up the ending because they were never invested in the first place. On the other hand, in order for a reader to get mad at the ending, they needed to care about the characters and the story in the first place. So, I'm glad I was able to make someone care enough to leave such a long, vociferous review.

Chinese negative review

Chinese negative review translation

This is a very fair review. The art in Victoria Clair looks bad. There's a reason that I always collaborate with artists. One of my biggest regrets about not releasing a second Victoria Clair game is that I'm a lot better at drawing now, but the original Victoria Clair is the most prominent place that my art lives on the internet. Ah well...

Russian negative review

This is a review I got in Russian. It is very long, but here's the translation:

Neutral review. A good attempt to release Professor Layton on PC with a bit of Ace Attorney. We play as a young detective girl Victoria Claire, investigating a murder on the Orient Express. Well, not exactly on it, but on a train in 1920. As in the Layton series, we walk, talk to people and solve puzzles. There are fifteen puzzles in total and it is disappointing that the player is forced to solve the problems of rearranging matches and creating bridges twice. With such a small number of puzzles, they could have all been made unique. There is no penalty for incorrect answers, and since many require entering an answer, they can be solved by enumeration. Well, of course, what kind of Layton would it be if there were no tricky puzzles here, where you have to deny a direct solution and choose a non-obvious one, which turns out to be correct, here it is a puzzle with figures and numbers on them. Each puzzle has three clues that can be opened by feeding Victoria's (not the queen's) cat. Initially, you are given resources for ten hints, and you can get the same amount in the kitchen. Some puzzles are given during a conversation, while others are launched by examining certain objects in the location. After a successful solution, Victoria says one of the phrases used by Layton and company. In the finale, the game turns into something like First-Class Lawyer, where the player needs to listen to the testimony of witnesses, look for contradictions in them and, with the invariable cry of "HOLD IT", present evidence that exposes the lie. The killer reveals himself almost immediately, but it takes time to bring him to clean water. And when the case seems solved, this twist happens and everything turns out to be wrong. Bravo to the author for such an idea. The graphic style of a novice artist with distorted proportions is slightly off-putting, and there was absolutely no need to draw a cat licking eggs. But indie is what it is. Also, the font of the dialogues is very blurry, against the background of sharp illustrations, perhaps the game is not adapted for the laptop resolution of 1366 * 768. A good attempt to copy a well-known series with its own charm, but sags in terms of drawing and puzzles. I hope the second part will be better.

Let me just address a few things:

Otherwise, it's a pretty standard review. It summarizes what happens in the game and they didn't like the art.

I got two other negative reviews. One was a spam review with a bunch of unintelligible text, and I forget what the final one was. Both are lost to the sands of time, and by "time" I mean the unknowable domain of Steam's review-sorting system.

The Positive Reviews

I've selected a few positive reviews to react to, briefly:

Review with suggestions

Review about the writing

Review summarizing the game

I'm glad these people seemed to like my sense of humor! It was also my first time writing anything of this scale, so I was delightfully surprised that so many reviews mentioned the characters/tone/humor/plot so favorably. I was expecting my writing to get roasted just as hard as the art, given it was my first foray into both.

Review complaining about the math

People reallly didn't like the math puzzles. Heard you loud and clear, friends!

Nice review

Review from a streamer

It's cool that this person was able to play along with chat! I never imagined that Victoria CLair would be played on stream, so it's a happy surprise!

Review from a parent

This is my favorite review of them all! It makes me SO happy that this person was able to connect with their daughter over the game. It's a tear-jerker every time I read it. It's legitmitely so heartwarming that sometimes when I'm feeling bad about myself or my games, I reread it to make myself feel better.

Endings are hard to title

Victoria Clair reading

If you read this far, thanks for reading! Victoria Clair is never getting a sequel—maybe I'll write a blog post about that—so it was super nice to get to reflect on it like this! My first-ever game... five years ago. I've come a long way, but I still have such a long way to go!