"Arima Lodge" is not a sincerely made game, it's an extremely small and unambitious Game Jam bit of shovelware made for the sake of the developers and published for the sake of the developers. It's an extremely short story non-game about a guy who gets into an elevator with another guy (ooh, sinister). Well, we shouldn't expect anything better from non-game Game Jam demos.
What do you do in the game? Click through badly written dialogue with a couple of childish, badly done "QTE" sections. That's it.
There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time.
We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle.
The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 5 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download.
This is not a sincerely made product, it was made for a game jam, which is a problem. It was done in a constrained period of time; professional game development takes years of effort from teams of talented and qualified people. A "game" slapped together in a weekend by an amateur simply isn't going to have any value for gamers, and that plays out clearly with this shovelware.
Also, products created in game jams were never intended for gamers, they exist only to stroke the ego of amateur developers who can't get a real job in the industry. When developers, especially untalented ones, put themselves before gamers, garbage like "Arima Lodge" is the inevitable result.
It's improper for shovelware like this to be published through Steam Direct, because it's harmful. This half-baked, rushed, non-professional product, not designed for gamers, is taking up space on the Steam store that should be given over to genuine, talented developers who do the right thing and make fully developed, not rushed products for gamers. This makes it harder for gamers like you and me to find these genuinely made products.
The graphics aren't great, a single set room with a bunch of badly written text, an extremely low effort entry on Steam Direct. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
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 10 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?
Definitely not. This isn't worth it. I'm paraphrasing another reviewer here, but this should be a paid product... they'd have to pay people to download it.
