"Escape from DuFo" is a fairly basic Unreal asset flipped escape room type first person adventure game, one of many hundreds, if not thousands of these glutting Steam. The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unreal Marketplace packs, arranged them haphazardly in a first person adventure game template, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.
Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware. Now, the game is free, but it originally wasn't, so the intention of the developer was clearly to get paid for someone else's Unreal assets. It's weird how they managed to credit the music creators but not the asset creators. I guess music creators are more likely to sue, or something.
While Unreal Engine makes the game look reasonable, there's more to any game than the game engine (that the developers didn't create) and the game assets (that the developers didn't create).
This game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
It's also very very short and can be finished in 10 minutes. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than 2 hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than some free game demos for AAA games.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. And that's extra damning since they made the game free, and people still didn't want it.
So, should you download this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
The game is currently free, but the developers were charging money for it. Nothing speaks more to a developers belief in themselves and their product than making their game available for everyone without remuneration, but this is also in some ways an acknowledgement that the game failed to achieve any commercial success (unsurprising due to the quality issues). It's a shame in this case that the implementation is below the minimum standards a dedicated PC game should offer to enthusiasts. The quality here is simply too low for me to recommend, even for free.
