Doggone Hungry

Nobody will read my review so.... I will eat 1 tablespoon of ketchup for every like and award this gets. About the game: it's fun, it's cute... it's okay.

"Doggone Hungry" is a student project from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia USA. This year the students made an admittedly adorable game demo about a pet dog, and you need to achieve various goals like getting your toy back and eating lots of food, so as far as dog simulators go, this is one of the most realistic I've ever seen. Unfortunately it's very short and the technical implementation is sorely lacking, to the point the students may not have passed the course. What do you do in the game? It's a bunch of simple puzzles/minigame stuff, with a mobile-esque low poly/stylized visual presentation. The developers failed one of the most basic, essential requirements for any PC game... customisability. There's no settings screen at all. You can't tweak or fix the controls, resolution is locked, there's no graphics tweaks at all... this is never acceptable. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. 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. On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? 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.