Creator's Chasm

"Creator's Chasm" is another garbage tier Unreal kitbashed dumped on Steam, but at least plotwise the developer tried to do something slightly different. Instead of shooting waves of asset flipped zombies, you've got slightly different themed chapters, one platformer and the rest shooters. The developer cleverly attempts to solve all mental health issues for artists through the medium of a video game, but showing other artists how incompetent artists can be is probably not really helping. I'd rather play one of the zombie asset flips. 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 by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here. The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?" While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't. The game assets here look a lot better than the actual game they're assembled on... that doesn't mean this is necessarily an asset flip or a kitbash, because there's no proof. But what matters is that this has all the same terrible quality as asset flips, and at the end of the day that's one of the reasons people don't like asset flips, the quality is bad. That's a problem. This game is fairly dated at 6 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $2 USD for this. 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 2 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? What's the verdict? Definitely not. This is impossible to recommend. To quote another Steam reviewer, this should be a paid product... they should be paying people to download it.