It may look and play like an asset, but Refund Me If You Can is nothing if not clever with its premise: you have two hours to evade a monster, exit a sewer-like maze, and you have to make a promise. .. your honor, that you will not request a refund through Steam. You are different, and the game is not ashamed to call you that, a coward.
Valve allowed users to refund a game on Steam starting in 2015 with only two eligibility criteria: 1. You must not have played more than two hours of that game and 2. You must request a refund within 14 days after purchasing this game. Refund policies like this might make sense in an increasingly digital gaming landscape, but the two-hour limit carries the risk of tying up shorter games, allowing users to use the policy as a rental service. Pay me back if you can challenge users to be so shitty.
Coming out on Steam today, Sungame Studio’s Refund Me If You Can is certainly a visually rough game, and I ran into at least two or three invisible walls while trying to parse my way through the dungeon-like environment. There are technically two games it asks you to play. One of them is the escape challenge and the time limit. The other, smarter part, I think, is a challenge similar to “The Game” where you have to agree not to refund the game or it becomes a coward.
Who exactly are you a coward of? The developer? Yourself? Vapor? What even is cowardice? Selling on Steam for a low price of $3.99 ($6) makes it easy not to refund the game. This might have been a tougher challenge if the game cost more than $10… but with a game that plays and looks this way, I don’t know if you could really get away with your load beyond what Sungame is currently asking for.
The game lives up to its premise from the moment you load. The clock starts ticking in the main menu, without even giving me a gift to turn on full screen and adjust a few other things. You’re encouraged to jump into a short tutorial that shows you the ropes. You get a flashlight, which I don’t think ever recharges when it runs out (at least that was my experience), and you can put two different colored flares to track your movements, one green and one red.
But that monster. Yes. He didn’t need to be scared like this so early in the damn morning. The opening warning, which is really more of a loose contractual agreement not to refund the game, states that the level can be completed in 15 minutes. I put about seven before deciding to see what the monster would do to me. Surprise, it killed me and I had to start again, this time with another seven minutes against me.
Refund Me If You Can is completely a “premise game”, so much so that there’s little else to enjoy here outside of the “don’t refund this game haha” joke it gives the player. I wish Refund Me wasn’t so sloppy visually and mechanically, because that’s not a bad premise! It just needed more time in the oven. Or, perhaps, at least it should have been cooked first.