"Alta's Odyssey" 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 badly made, abandoned Early Access platformer trying very hard to be more art than game, and failing hard at both. Games can be art, but art is where the pinnacle of creativity, narrative and imagination meet the pinnacle of craftsmanship and technical skill (the Mona Lisa would not be hanging in the Louvre if she was drawn in crayons). This achieves neither of those important pillars.
This is a pointless platformer about a guy grieving over the death of his pet rabbit. Once more, narrative purpose cannot be achieved unless it's backed by a competent delivery, which this lacks... janky platforming, ugly graphics, this has nothing to offer gamers.
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 developers abandoned this 1 year and 12 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.
On the topic of visuals, the weak looking 2D retro assets seem like they'd be more at home in a browser game or a mobile app. 3D graphics accelerators hit the mainstream of PC gaming in the mid 1990's with cards like the ATI Rage and Voodoo3D, there's no excuse for such poor 2D graphics in 2025. That alone is enough to disqualify this for recommendation.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This isn't even free, the developer intended to monetise this through DLC if they could ever be bothered finishing it. They could not be bothered finishing it.
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 2 concurrent players[/b]... 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?
This is a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.
