DreamDasher

this is a particle showcase with a player controller thrown in, and it plays like one. it's not the worst game on earth by far, but just because something is free and playable doesn't mean it deserves a thumbs up or even your time. There's an invisible gap above spikes that effectively makes them twice as tall, this is annoying for casuals but especially annoying for speedrunners. When speedrunning, you make a lot of tight jumps to save time. Nobody wants to make mid-jump approximations for how big a hazard ACTUALLY IS. Spikes are EVERYWHERE, so you'll be doing that math very very often. The only nice thing I can say about the game is that levels usually have several routing options, but this means ♥♥♥♥ to me compared to how stupid the spikes are misc notes: -the particles are so numerous that the screen is constantly noisy, but they can be disabled in settings -the input binds are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, players can rebind them to something not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the controls menu Steam, switch to a star or x/10 system ffs

"DreamDasher" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This is a bizarre and poorly made 2D retro pixelcrap platformer (that looks bad even for pixelcrap with some kind of weird tie-dyed nightmare aesthetic) and controls, gameplay and polish all exactly on par with the visuals... awful. At least it's consistent? There's a few platformer elements here, parkour mechanics and, air-dash, wall-slide, and invert-gravity, along with the ability to perform a dash attack and change gravity once between touching the ground. None of this is implemented well. The game concept is equally poor... The whole story is about exploring the Dreamworld as the DreamDasher, discovering its secrets, and defeating the Nightmare. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. 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 this unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 90 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download. The graphics here are particularly awful, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment. It's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. This game is fairly dated at 5 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 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. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? This is a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.