Downstairs

I was intending to review this as a UEVR mod game since it utilizes the Unreal Engine 5.1. Unfortunately, performance was so bad that I couldn't get it to run at even 45 fps even when lowering all the in-game graphical settings on my RTX 3080. I even lowered sampling to .65 and it was still running poorly, plus I noticed a host of graphical glitches. So in all fairness, I decided to play this in Non-VR and see what the deal was. Unfortunately, performance was still bad as I would get variable frame rates from 25-110 fps from one moment to the next. I still noticed several graphical glitches, in particular, when turning I would notice several screen tears. Then I came across a game-breaking bug when I pressed E to interact with one of the notes in the car garage of the girlfriend. I could no longer get rid of the text. It was impossible to close. This game should be listed as Early Access. It's not in a playable state in my opinion.

"Downstairs" is a short asset flip looking Unreal first person puzzle adventure game where you wander around what look a lot like a collection of Unreal Marketplace/Fab assets and click around on some puzzles. It's thankfully short, but when the best thing about your "game" is that it goes away quickly, this is not a flex, it's a problem. The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too. 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. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $3 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. 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.