"Cracking the Stone" is Cracking the Stone is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Cracking the Stone". Cracking the Stone is a garbage more-book-than-game effort where yet another unqualified amateur developer decides he's a qualified psychologist and single handledly tackles and cures serious mental health issues like depression and trauma. Yeah... it's absolutely insulting and harmful when amateur game developers pretend to be healthcare professionals.
But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Cracking the Stone, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Cracking the Stone" too.
There's a correct process to publish game demos and advertisements like this on Steam. You can see it in [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos]Valve's Steamworks Documentation[/url] but either the "developer" didn't know about that (something they absolutely should before they even touch Steam Direct), or they deliberately and willfully bypassed this process to mislead gamers, for profit. Either is not okay.
Usually the purpose of these advertisements is to get you to shell out money to the developer to buy the full product, but the developer hasn't bothered actually making a product you can buy, leaving this as an advertisement for nothing. We must question what value this pointless advertising has for gamers... and the answer is "none". Due to the poor public response amongst gamers for this advertisement, there's no indication the developer will go on to make the full product.
Trying to address serious issues such as mental and emotional health through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good.
The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful.
It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to address mental health issues. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers.
People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get attention/fame (and in this case YOUR MONEY) by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time.
It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos
While it might seem like an innocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace.
It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers.
SteamDB shows this only ever had a peak player count of ONE person... just one guy (having a bad time). Maybe that was just the developer himself. When I ran this up to review it, I personally matched the peak player count for the game. Just me. That's painfully bad reception... everyone on Steam ignored this (and there's over 130,000,000 gamers on Steam and up to 42 million gamers logged on at any given time). Just one player peak. That is epic failure. Even though this is "free". If this isn't good enough for every other player on the planet, it's not good enough for you, either.
Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.
Finally, I'm here to help save gamers time by filtering out the noise and substandard games. If you don't agree with my assessment of the defects in this game, go ahead and download it... maybe you'll find the same defects to be as unacceptable as I did, maybe not. Even write your own review. Positive or negative, game reviews are here to help other gamers by informing their decisions on what to spend their time on.
