Gulping snake

very interesting game, worth trying

"Gulping snake" is an incredibly unambitious Adobe Flash tier puzzle game that blends the mechanics of Snake (the snake eats stuff and grows, wow, never been done before) and slaps it on a basic, near Sokoban-esque grid. The idea is to eat the fruit by carefully planning moves around the constrained grid, but you have to do exactly the right moves or you'll end up blocking yourself and failing the level. So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem. The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?" While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't. The graphics here are particularly awful, minimalist pixelcrap/MS-Paint stuff that would look bad in 1993, and looks considerably worse today, 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. Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers. 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 9 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. 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.