"Archipelago" is a low key asset flip, a bunch of other people's assets assembled badly to make a basic game, typically this kind of thing is done by amateur developers without sufficient budget, talent and/or staff to do the job of game development professionally. It's then quickly rushed into Steam Direct. And, unsurprisingly, this never results in a product with any quality, interest, or value for gamers.
This asset flip cancer, apart from being slightly worse than most asset flips, is additionally toxic because of the garbage social media/streamer integrations... yeah, this was designed for internet non-ebrities, not gamers. It just gets worse. Don't be fooled into thinking there's any serious game here, just lame elements of a low poly third persion action platformer, but that's all as badly done as the godawfully bad flipped low poly assets.
So, the game might look better than you'd expect from an amateur project (and it still looks so bad), but this is because it's partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Very little in this game is truly the creation of the "developer", it's just a bunch of rearranged assets.
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "Archipelago".
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
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 7 concurrent players[/b]... 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?
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. However, if you are a streamer and want to get rid of both of your followers, this is the way to do it.
