"Find 101 Doomers" is one of literally hundreds of simple, minimalist 2D line art "Find 100 Hidden turnips" or whatever games... hunt through a simple illustration to find 100 hidden things. The first time I saw one of these I thought it was a fairly okay, if short experience... but the problem is, there's literally hundreds of these plaguing the store. They're fairly low effort when you think about what's needed to make a more genuine game.
The whole thing could have been done in a web browser. We have to ask if Steam was intended to compete with Firefox, Chrome or Safari. I didn't spend thousands building a gaming rig so I could play glorified browser games.
In this case the developer is ripping off a public domain "meme", in an act of creative bankruptcy. Trying to get YOUR money for public domain IP. Disgusting.
This one unfortunately fits into the scam category, it's not free as you need to pay more money to unlock the full game. Deceptive pricing deliberately intended to mislead gamers, for profit. Never okay. To support this there's the appearance of quite a lot of zero day reviews, all written with the same style, in Russian. Review manipulation, for profit. It's never okay.
The other problem is just how many of these there are... they're practically spamming the Steam store at this point. It's close to pollution... mass produced slop that genuine game developers have to try to compete with to get visibility for their more seriously developed games. And that's not good for gamers, or for real developers.
This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
On pricing and value for gamers, this isn't really free as you're expected to pay up $3000 USD to unlock content/DLC, the game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free".
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 13 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
[quote][b][url=https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-notices/16-cfr-part-465-trade-regulation-rule-use-consumer-reviews-testimonials-final-rule]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/b]
This product features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the product launched on Steam, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
Due to the 2024 FTC ruling (16 CFR Part 465), these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law.[/quote]
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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
