Anima

Had a chance to play early and this game is obviously made with passion and love.

I love puzzle games, and I randomly came across this free one—it's surprisingly super fun! Can’t believe a group of students made it in just 15 weeks. You can really feel the love and passion they put into it. Well done!

This game is very refreshing and fun. The puzzles are progressively challenging. Kudos to the whole team for this amazing work! I'm on the 3rd level and I’m going to keep playing

This game is amazing so far. I haven't encountered a single bug and the controls are intuitive and fluid. Graphics are solid as well and you immediately feel sucking in the world of Anima. The music is super relaxing and so far this to me is the kind of game I'm looking for when I want to sit back and relax after a long day at work. I will update this review as I keep playing the game to make it more in depth.

Jeu sympa avec de bonnes idées mais on aurait TELLEMENT préféré un jeu multi :/... Un peu trop de lourdeur/rigidité dans les contrôles à mon goût mais ça reste un jeu d'énigmes bien foutu. Très encourageants pour la suite ! (Gros lag pendant la cinématique par contre !)

"Anima" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from Campus ADN in Montreal, 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. The students made a short and unambitious puzzle platformer concerning two robots in an abandoned mining station trying to figure out what happened to their creators. The gameplay is limited to moving and deconstructing obstacles using two robots, Min.I and Andro.ID, each having special abilities. It's a little buggy and of course unoptimised... there's no incentive for students to behave like professional developers and maintain their products after the course is over. Yet their homework assignments get published on Steam where the expectation is that they should be maintained. See why all these homework assignments are so problematic? There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal. The graphics in this game are really quite good, which at least makes the game look more appealing. 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. Here, you get a reasonably even match, enough to give this a pass. 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 5 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.