心霊旅館

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"心霊旅館" is a simple 3D adventure/horror game from Japan. It looks and feels a lot like a student project, but it's certainly genuinely made, doesn't look like an asset flip. It's a bit unpolished and rough around the edges, too, but the developer seems genuine and is working on improving the game. This features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, unfortunately, so for a game to be truly the best it needs to excel visually as well as all the other areas of game design. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. 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? This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.