Amalgamy

Really fun 2D indie game in the same vein as Hidden in Plain Sight. Complete the task of activating all the rings or kill the nearby characters and be the last man standing, how you do it is up to you! Works perfectly on Steam Deck as well, zero issues.

"Amalgamy" is a deplorably bad 2D retro pixel top down "stealth" game with no players. If there were any, players would act like NPCs to activate objectives across the map. Gameplay involves attempting to identify and eliminate other hidden players, using basic stealth mechanics and abilities, before they find you or complete the objective first. There's other games that did this a lot better, and the garbage tier pixelcrap implementation, zero real content etc lead this to be a complete failure that only ever had a full game [b]once[/b]. What's the game about? This is a multiplayer social deduction game set in a medieval environment. Players must act like NPCs to activate objectives across the map. Gameplay involves attempting to identify and eliminate other hidden players, using basic stealth mechanics and abilities, before they find you or complete the objective first. This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $3 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 5 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.