"A Smoker's Story" is not a game. Games contain meaningful gamelike interaction and game loops, which are absent in this "art experience".
Instead of being a game, "A Smoker's Story" is a garbage quality 3-5 minute long Youtube video about being a smoker stuck in a room with chimney. It doesn't make a lot of sense and the way it's slapped together is some of the laziest low effort assembly I've seen on Steam Direct in hours.
We get this non-game shovelware on Steam whenever film school dropouts are desperate for anyone to give them validation, so they publish their short film on Steam because nobody watches their garbage on Youtube.
There was a video section on Steam, but it's deprecated and basically closed, so failed filmmakers seem to just try to abuse the Steam games section instead. Why is this good for gamers? It's not.
For those unfamiliar with what actually makes something a game, a "game loop" describes the interaction and feedback a gamer has when playing a game.
Tetris, for example, has a game loop where a random block appears, the gamer interacts with the block to position it, and then the game decides if that finishes a row or not, increases the players score if any rows were completed, then gives the gamer another block to position. Counter-Strike has a game loop where a player seeks another player, tests their skill against that player by shooting them or being shot, the computer rewards the player if they win, and then if the player survives, they repeat that loop.
There's no loop here, no true interactive feedback. It simply is not a game, it cannot be "played".
This has misleadingly been launched in the "Games" section of Steam instead of the "Software" section. This is a common mistake for developers who are new to Steam, or don't understand the difference between games and software which isn't a game. It seems this software published incorrectly as a game is simply lack of experience/knowledge of the correct process.
Here's a link for the process to publish non-game software/non-game "art experiences" on Steam:
[url=https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithPublishing?issueid=925]Steam Developer Help With Software Publishing[/url]
It's unfortunate this process was not known about/followed, resulting in a non-game "art experience"/Youtube video being published in the wrong place.
Publishing Youtube videos on Steam in the Games section as games is misleading to gamers and somewhat harmful, because it pollutes the Steam marketplace and takes away visibility and market exposure for genuine game developers who do the right thing and make games for gamers.
There are no gameplay loops in this rejected film school dropout exhibition, no "gameplay", no meaningful game like interaction. As such, this has no merit as a video game for gamers, and so I cannot recommend this non-game as a game to gamers.
The poor quality of this product is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak user count was only ONE person. That's right, only one person ever watched this at a time. When I tried this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak user count for the product. OUCH.
The only user activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it.
Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality product is to be expected.
