All Hallows Evie

Really fun game, and if you grew up playing games like Manic Miner, Big Mac or Mr Puniverse back in the day then it'll hit you right in the nostalgia! Controls are smooth, gameplay is easy to pick up but the levels are hard to master (good combo). I'll be playing alot more of this!!

"All Hallows Evie" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This is a poorly made, painfully generic "retro" 2D pixelcrap platformer where you take on the role of Evie, who must navigate caverns to collect all the candy buckets that have been stolen by the Spooktoids to save Halloween. Collect all the stuff in each platformer level to move on to the next screen, or, as did just about anyone who installed this, quickly uninstall it instead. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. The "game" here, such as it is, is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic, minmimum effort stuff, more like a 'weekend project' rather than a commercial/professional product... it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?" While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. The use of low-resolution, ugly pixelcrap (which at least looks authentic... for the most part) here is dishonestly presented as a "deliberate artistic choice", but we all know it's because the developer wasn't capable of anything better. The result is a visually unappealing game, especially when compared to thousands of professionally developed games here. Whether the developer lacked the talent for modern visuals or the money to hire an artist is irrelevant. This choice significantly detracts from the game... gaming is a visual medium. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are incredibly rare exceptions that made it [i]in spite[/i] of the pixelcrap holding them back (imagine how much better they would be if the graphics didn't suck). Pixelcrap is never okay. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 3 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library? I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.