"Dear Future" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from UC Santa Cruz in California. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have.
Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers.
And the students pushed out... this. Thing. Which is barely a game, it's a non-concurrent multiplayer "experience"... I guess this is hard to explain. You wander around a really badly done, repetitive procgen hellscape with a camera, take some photos, and then the photos and stuff you did gets picked up by the next person to try "play" this "game". What a terrible idea.
If there's a set of rules that game developers must follow (which will include stuff like "No Pixelcrap"), the first and most essential of those rules must be "Thou Shalt Not Use Other People As A Substitute For Content". This relies completely on contributions from the gaming community to work, and this is garbage, so there's no players contributing. The hubris of amateur/unqualified developers in assuming they're so awesome at being game developers that they will automatically "go viral" is almost as painful as experiencing the garbage these guys produce.
In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably, especially combined with the procgen rubber stamping of the same limited set of game assets over and over again. Procgen isn't an okay substitute for content either. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say.
There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers?
It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff.
In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 10 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Since this is more of a student tech demo than a full, genuinely made game for gamers, and offers no Steam features, like a +1 to your game count, I can't recommend downloading this over a full, professionally made game, of which there are thousands here on Steam.
