Bleeding Abyss

"Bleeding Abyss" is kind of like the result of someone playing Hollow Knight, discovering they have $100 USD, learning about Steam Direct, and saying "Aha! I can do that too!" and then making a rather poor "bullet hell" game with mild platformer-esque elements. It should be no surprise down here in the shovelware section of Steam that both the adventure/platformer elements and the bullet hell/shoot 'em up elements are done quite badly. This is very much the Hollow Knight you would expect to get if you got it from Temu. What do you do in the game? Some very, very mediocre bullet hell stuff, with a 2D adventury type wrapper. And a couple of upgrades that are meaningless when the gameplay is so bad. Oh and also some badly written, cringey e-book sections. Which makes the whole experience worse. 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. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging a frankly delusional $12 USD for this. $12 for pixelcrap. That's delusion. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded. 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 4 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? I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.