Thousands of retro 2D platformers are infesting Steam, and "Cube Lab" is just more pollution in a crowded market of terrible games. There are over 17,000 platformers on Steam, literally thousands (you can go see for yourself if you search for the platformer tag on the store, I'm not kidding). And this is far from being one of the best of those.
This is a minimalist platformer with some interesting puzzles... the design of which is completely wasted because of the incredibly weak visual presentation and phoned in technical delivery, the result of which was failure on Steam Direct.
The platforming genre is pretty much obsolete... just a tiny number of professionally developed platformers exist on PC and offer any real value or interest to gamers (Silksong, etc). This is nowhere near being as good as Hollow Knight or Silksong. Even without a price tag, it is easy to see why gamers ignored this in favor of modern, professionally developed 3D games. This is offering nothing new or interesting, so it's easy to see why this failed.
This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this.
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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 4 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
There are over 140,000 games on Steam, not every one of them is a hidden gem. I'm here to help gamers find the ones that actually matter in that sea of Steam Direct self-published mess. If you don't agree with my findings in this review, you should definitely download it and play it to see for yourself. I'm happy to have helped you make an informed choice, regardless of the outcome.
