"Ceramic Soul" is a student project self-published on Steam Direct. It's from DigiPen. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" games, we must still question what value they have for gamers. This isn't a fully fleshed out game. It's the result of an academic exercise and has much more limited value than a professionally developed game.
Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments. It helps their marketing and makes students feel good, but it puts the business before the needs of gamers.
This is a sadly unpolished and abandoned game demo where you control a porcelain life size girl doll and wander around a house full of toys, solving a few problems and avoiding "Mother", the jumpscare monster. This is another one of those disappointing student projects where if it was a full game that was finished and polished it would probably make a bit of money, but instead, we got an unfinished glimpse at what might have been but what never will be.
The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. 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. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
Next is pricing and what value this has 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.
There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers?
It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff.
In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free, that was a dismal public reception. But if you take into account the problems I bring up in this review, it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
This student project/tech demo/glorified homework assignment provides no Steam profile benefits, no +1 to your game count, and little value to gamers (because it's just a small, unpolished student project), so I can't recommend this over the thousands of full, professionally made games on Steam.
