Expedition Oregon

"Expedition Oregon" is just as the developer describes, an utterly garbage ripoff of the Oregon Trail that somehow manages to look even worse than the 1980's elementary school classic. This is basically a set of menus that could have been done in a web browser, coupled with a chain of RNG events that eventually kills you as you go on a FTL like quest to get from A to B as a colonist. What do you do in the game? Uninstall real fast... seriously this is so much worse than Oregon Trail that if settlers had ever known their arduous migration would eventually result in the creation of a video game this bad they would have just stayed on the east coast. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. 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 7 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. There's well over 130 million gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, 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. Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam 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.