Believe it or not, Greetings is not an asset flip. While the game is made primarily out of other people's assets, with placeholder/stock assets and engine elements all taken from asset stores, the developer credited the people who created those assets, which means this isn't the usual attempt to pass of someone else's work as their own.
However, while we understandably must call out and warn gamers about the unethical behaviour behind plagiarism and asset flipping, there's the other main reason we hate asset flips (even if this isn't an unethical, for-profit one). It's because they're awful if you try to take them seriously as a game. This is because, and it should be no surprise, when "developers" can't work out how to create their own professional game assets, or lack the budget to hire staff who can, it turns out they're also not really capable or competent at any of the other parts of game development either. And that results in awful games. Games like Greetings.
And it shows, because this short little walking sim of a game, just a tech demo, is a buggy mess. If you can get it to work (so you can enjoy looking at the assets the "developers" "borrowed"), it takes a minute to complete. The "developers", who seem really full of themselves, boast that "nobody can play it for more than 5 minutes"... true on a few levels. It's so awful nobody would want to, and it's so bug ridden and crash prone it's a challenge to get it running for more than a minute.
All you do, seriously, is walk down 4 corridors. The end. This is the kind of crap that gives indie devs such a bad name.
It's important to mention that this isn't a sincerely made, professional game, it's a Game Jam/demo project. Game Jam and other student/project games are not made for gamers, they're made for the benefit of stroking the ego of developers. It's obviously not possible for a game slapped together over a few days to be of the same quality as a properly, sincerely made game from a full development team with a full budget who take the right amount of time and put in genuine hard work to create a product for gamers. Sure, it is possible to slap together a game in such a manner, unprofessionally. This is a lot like driving a car using only your feet. Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it's a good idea, and often ends up in disaster.
I'm sure they think it's remarkable they were able to make a game without dedicating the right resources and talent to the job, but we must ask why this benefits gamers... and it doesn't. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience.
So, should you download this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ products on Steam?
Greetings has no upfront cost, but just because something doesn't have a price tag doesn't mean it's valuable. 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.
