Breeze

"Breeze" is a furry friendly Flash/Browser tier point and click adventure about a sugar glider detective and a "charming" village that turns out to be a lot more than meets the eyes. And not just because it's badly drawn. What do you do in the game? A lot of clicking through badly written, sometimes translated visual novel text, and some ultra-lite point and click adventure stuff. There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal. So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem. 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. Visually, this features mediocre hand drawn style "Baby's First Wacom Tablet" art instead of contemporary graphics. This obviously looks better than pixelcrap, but that's a really low bar to barely stumble over. 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 worse than a professionally made game would look, and that's a major deterrent. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. Most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's usually some kind of monetisation, from nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, to any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on. In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam 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.