"Dusk Hollow" is an extraordinarly badly made top down hack and slash brawler. This is a horror game where you're a miner trying to rescue friends trapped in an underground cave system. Your actions involve combat with monsters, using found weapons and materials to upgrade your skills, and navigating the dark levels using a flashlight. Which really makes this sound a lot better than it is... RPG aspects of the game are minimal to none, it's mostly just directionless brawling with a few goals thrown in in the hopes that anyone would play long enough to see them (spoiler: Nope).
The graphics aren't great, his looks like it was made in the 1990s... the game assets are awful. I mean, hooray for not using stock assets, but when the game looks even worse than stock assets, we have a totally different problem. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and 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. You deserve better than compromises.
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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this 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.
