Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort 2D platformers, and "Cubic Dweller" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 17,000 platformers on Steam, almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes. This is not one of the good ones.
This is a very poorly presented and somewhat unpleasant to play minimalist precision platformer where, get this, the best the developer could come up with for a playable character is a red square. The absolute state of the "indie" amateur development movement right here, folks.
This is a tired, outdated experience from a tired, outdated and obsolete game genre. Just a couple of platformers out of literally thousands have any appeal for gamers lately (Super Meat Boy, Hollow Knight etc). This "me too" Steam Direct platformer in a crowded genre offers nothing new. It's "free", but [i]free[/i] doesn't mean [i]good.[/i]
On top of all that, the pixelcrap "art" here isn't even used consistently throughout the game. If you're going to commit to a terrible aesthetic, you at least have to be consistent about it. The one thing you could hope for when developers insult gamers with pixelcrap is authenticity, and they failed at that, too.
The inconsistency with the pixelcrap is a tacit admission that the developer was aware they could have done better but chose not to. Making a game look bad, on purpose. That's an insult.
This game is fairly dated at 5 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.
This was made with the godawful "GameMaker Studio" construction kit/toolset, which is popular amongst amateur developers because it handholds you through making really crap 2D games that you can publish for $100 on Steam Direct. This lets you pat yourself on the back for pretending to be a real game developer, which explains why GameMaker Studio is responsible for so much ignored garbage on Steam.
GameMaker Studio has never really been used to make a truly successful game, but that doesn't stop people from trying and failing. It's a particularly bad game engine that can only be used for making low quality 2D products. Like this. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old saying goes. Another reason this particular game wasn't successful.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $3 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 3 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
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.
Finally, I write these reviews to try help people navigate the thousands of games on Steam so they don't waste time on low quality products. There's over 140,000 games on Steam... Steam Direct is allowing an influx of around 40-50 new games [i]every day![/i]. If you think I'm wrong about this one, go ahead and add it to your library, download it, install it, play it and see for yourself. Maybe you'll come to agree with me after wasting your time. Either way, consider writing your own reviews too. I'm just glad if my review helps give gamers enough info to make a better informed choice.
