Dead on Arrival: Remastered

"Dead on Arrival: Remastered" is a fairly basic Unity asset flipped first person horror adventure, one of many hundreds, if not thousands of these glutting Steam. The "developer" paid for a few Unity asset store packs, arranged them haphazardly in a first person adventure game template, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers. At least this is free, so it's not a cash grab. You're in a creepy old house and you have to click on stuff and do a little inventory management. It's been done a million times before, usually by asset flippers as cheap low effort minimum viable products. Actually the only interesting thing about this asset flip is that it's somehow Early Access, but also not Early Access because it's a "remaster", but it's a "remaster" of a game that apparently doesn't exist. Yet is also still in development because it's Early Access. Except it's abandoned. Confusing, huh? The game was abandoned roughly 2 months after launch and hasn't been updated in well over a year. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed. Taking this as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. It's poorly optimised and badly polished, as movement has you lurching around... everything is clunky. This is very unpleasant to play just from an interaction perspective. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you download this free game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Yes, the game is completely free. This is noble a gesture that shows dedication to both gamers, and the gaming industry. Nothing speaks more to a developers belief in themselves and their product than making their game available for everyone without remuneration. It's a shame in this case that the implementation is below the minimum standards a dedicated PC game should offer to enthusiasts. There's no "maybe" option in Steam, unfortunately, but I hope to see more work from this developer, perhaps as part of a professional game development company that can make full use of their talents without needing to make budget/quality compromises.