"Dirty Room" is a low key asset flip, a bunch of other people's assets assembled badly to make a basic game, typically this kind of thing is done by amateur developers without sufficient budget, talent and/or staff to do the job of game development professionally. It's then quickly rushed into Steam Direct. And, unsurprisingly, this never results in a product with any quality, interest, or value for gamers.
There's a promising premise here, of course, detective investigating stuff which results in a bit of FPS violence (who doesn't love that, it's the primary and most successful game format on Steam) but the quality of this one is straight through the floor.
It's not at all helped by the unethical acts of the developer pushing this as free when it's not, you have to pay money to get all the content. It's never okay, at least in my book, when developers misleadingly push something as free when we all know it isn't.
So, the game might look better than you'd expect from an amateur project, but this is because it's partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Very little in this game is truly the creation of the "developer", it's just a bunch of rearranged assets.
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "Dirty Room".
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
You're expected to pay up $9 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free".
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 15 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off.
