Searching for the term "platformer" on Steam gives you over 17,000 results... there's thousands and thousands of garbage tier platformers infesting Steam. "Flowball" fits right into that category of retro 2D shovelware glutting the Steam store. Only a tiny number of those are any good, and this isn't one of them.
This is an incredibly poorly made primitive platformer with no save game feature... you have to sit through the game's 19 levels, which is a terrible idea. But the game technical implementation is terrible too, so at least we have symmetry.
This is a tired, outdated experience from a tired, outdated and obsolete game genre. Just a couple of platformers out of literally thousands have any appeal for gamers lately (Super Meat Boy, Hollow Knight etc). This "me too" Steam Direct platformer in a crowded genre offers nothing new. It's "free", but [i]free[/i] doesn't mean [i]good.[/i]
This comes across as something unambitious and "simple" in terms of implementation and technical quality and depth, more like a game dev tutorial or an experiment. It's a classic case of a developer prioritizing the low effort needed to get a game listed on Steam over the actual delivery of a technically sound or compelling product. Whatever is needed to hammer out something "good" enough for Steam Direct self-publishing.
The graphics here are particularly awful, untextured primitive polygons and nothing else... 5 minutes of "work" creating all the assets for the game, it seems like a joke, 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.
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.
Now onto pricing and value.
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]5 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.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your 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.
