"Chasmal" is a badly made 2D retro pixelcrap top down shooter with no plot and no reason for anyone to play it. It really is painfully barebones and generic. Stuff like this always makes me ask, "What's the point?", and the point is someone paid $100 to tell their imaginary girlfriend they're a game developer. More seriously, this isn't doing anything that hasn't been done better by literally thousands of games here on Steam. Games don't exist in a vaccuum.
I think game developers should be forced to click on a check box when self-publishing to acknowledge if they have looked at any other video games before they publish one that's inferior to all the other ones. Anyway, not worth downloading. Most 1980's home console are better than this, and you can play those for free in a web browser.
The technical execution of this game is shallow and simplistic, just enough to tick the boxes required to get something (anything) published on Steam, rather than investing the huge amount of effort and budget needed to create a fully fledged, comprehensive, high quality product. This feels like a tech demo more than a full game.
The use of low-resolution, ugly pixelcrap here is dishonestly presented as a "deliberate artistic choice", but we all know it's because the developer wasn't capable of anything better. The result is a visually unappealing game, especially when compared to thousands of professionally developed games here. Whether the developer lacked the talent for modern visuals or the money to hire an artist is irrelevant. This choice significantly detracts from the game... gaming is a visual medium. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are incredibly rare exceptions that made it [i]in spite[/i] of the pixelcrap holding them back (imagine how much better they would be if the graphics didn't suck). Pixelcrap is never okay.
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.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
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 12 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?
This is a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.
