"Alchemy Frogs" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from Vancouver Film School in Canada. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have.
Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers.
This is a 2 player co-op puzzle platformer (they didn't teach the students how to do netcode so it's only "Remote Play Together" if you can get that to work, but kudos to Valve for another great bit of tech to help gamers accomodate for students not doing everything they should. Anyway.
This uses an unusual top down perspective for the platforming that doesn't help much, and while this game has more going for it than most amateur projects, it's got a slew of bugs that will never be fixed because, as a student project for students as opposed to a game made for gamers, this will never be maintained as the students moved on. See why all these student projects on Steam are a little problematic? Why is this good for gamers?
The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.
Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. You cannot play this without a console peasant children's toy. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. So much for the matter of pricing.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 14 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
