Yohjo Simulator was released into the world this week, but it seems that the world might not have been ready for it.
We talked about Yohjo Simulator back when it was first announced on Steam Greenlight and since then, for better or worse, the “little girl simulator” passed Steam’s voting stage and saw its official release to the online store on November 17.
In the game, you control a little girl who can run around headbutting the in-game items and NPCs to send them flying like ragdolls, doing backflips up the walls, and generally wreaking havoc on the area. As a “simulator game” in the same vein as the infamous Goat Simulator, it’s basically a physics sandbox where said physics are intentionally wacky and the glitchier things are, the better. There have been no end of these games popping up on the Steam market after the success of Goat Simulator, Surgeon Simulator and others, and their consistent ability to draw viewers to YouTube and Twitch channels has led to some labelling them with the disparaging term “YouTube bait”.
Judging by the trailer, Yohjo Simulator seemed like another slap-dash job looking to cash in on the trend, but could still potentially have had enough to it to appeal to the lol so random crowd.
However, when it was actually released this week, the reception was less than stellar, with the game quickly receiving numerous negative reviews and the few positive reviews being mainly the kind of one-sentence jokes that are either the best or worst part of Steam reviews, depending on your standpoint. There was even a concerted campaign in the Steam community hub to report the game to Valve, the company behind Steam, for supposed inappropriate content and/or being a complete rip-off. Unlike Goat Simulator, people maintained, Yohjo Simulator lacked fun, charm, or indeed anything to actually do. And for those who haven’t spent their formative years immersed in anime and manga where it’s normal for everyone to look like they’re 12 years old, seeing a little girl running around in skimpy gym shorts and knocking over men in speedos probably seemed in bad taste.
Popular gaming critic Jim Sterling ripped the game to shreds on his YouTube channel. You can see the gameplay and his criticisms of it for yourself in the video below.
This all culminated in the game being quietly pulled from the Steam store earlier today. The official reasons for this remain unclear as the developer and publisher have yet to comment on the takedown. Steam has been known, and indeed criticised, in the past for its lack of quality-control, and it is rare for Valve to take down anything that has already made it onto the store, no matter how terrible or broken the game is. In a high-profile incident last year, the mass-shooting themed game Hatred was briefly taken down from Steam Greenlight after complaints about its content, only to be promptly reinstated with an apology from co-founded and managing director Gabe Newell himself after cries of undue censorship.
Whether Yohjo Simulator will also make a return remains to be seen, but I’m sure there aren’t too many people out there lamenting its speedy removal from the service.
Videos & images: YouTube