Grizelda: Lynx and the Nine Lives

Super cute retro game! I think the play on words with the name is really fun. Once you play the game, you realize that there is nothing stolen from any other games. It's really very unique. The story is cute. The NPCs are absolutely adorable, and they each have their own little side quest. Each of the levels and worlds is cleverly designed and the puzzles and bosses take some real thought. It's not a throwaway game that you can beat in a few hours. There are so many secrets and layers. I can't believe this game was made by only two people. And it's completely free, so why not?

"Grizelda: Lynx and the Nine Lives" is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Legend of Zelda (Copyright Nintendo, 1986). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. Sure, Link has been replaced with a cat, but everything else is basically aping the success of Miyamotos genre defining breakthrough. Putting aside the unethical intellectual, creative and moral bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. "Grizelda: Lynx and the Nine Lives" is considerably worse than Legend of Zelda, despite being released many decades later. This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes 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, or something you might want to spend your time on. Despite having no up-front cost, this 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam. Just play Legend of Zelda on an emulator.