"Gash" is a low key asset flip, a bunch of other people's assets assembled badly to make a basic game, typically this kind of thing is done by amateur developers without sufficient budget, talent and/or staff to do the job of game development professionally. It's then quickly rushed into Steam Direct. And, unsurprisingly, this never results in a product with any quality, interest, or value for gamers.
There are a couple of what I think are bespoke assets here, and we can tell because those assets are really badly made and mismatch the rest of the assets in this dumpster fire. The backdrops look like they're all Synty Polygon Pack stuff, but yeah, the developer wanted you to think he created that stuff, and he put a price tag on it so he could get YOUR money for someone else's game assets. This is never okay.
But what is this anyway? Well, it's nothing. It's a simple, pointless tech demo, a first person slasher that's assembled as badly as the assets.
So, the game might look better than you'd expect from an amateur project, but this is because it's partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Even so, the assets are low poly garbage... Stealing/plagiarising the work of others but then ripping off stuff that isn't even very good seems kinda dumb... like going on a crime spree and stealing a box of toothpicks after shooting up the place. Very little in this game is truly the creation of the "developer", it's just a bunch of rearranged assets.
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "Gash".
The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 USD for this. %5 for someone else's game assets!!!
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 2 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
