"Escape Room" is a pointless VR tech demo that recreates, yes, an Escape Room, you know those kitschy places next to minigolf where they lock you in a room and you have to follow clues and puzzles and work out how to leave. Working out how to leave is definitely something this game makes you want to do.
What do you do in the game? Well, mostly it's wrestling with bugs in VR... the game is buggy and obviously untested, to the point it's unplayable, the 3D physics are broken, if you drop things you can't pick them up again... and this is severely dated, too.
The creators gave up on this 8 years and 3 months ago. It is destined to remain unfinished. This junkware is just polluting Steam and making it difficult for gamers to fully finished, completed games. That's not good for gamers.
The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?"
While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't.
The game assets here look a lot better than the actual game they're assembled on... that doesn't mean this is necessarily an asset flip or a kitbash, because there's no proof. But what matters is that this has all the same terrible quality as asset flips, and at the end of the day that's one of the reasons people don't like asset flips, the quality is bad. That's a problem.
It's VR exclusive, and that shows the developer failed to understand the most basic axiom of VR game design... if the only cool thing about your product is VR support, your product is not cool.
This game is fairly dated at 9 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.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us 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.
A peak of [b]9 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
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? What's the verdict?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
