"Gumbowl's Adventure" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not.
This godawfully bad Unity based platformer may have been put onto Steam as a joke, but the presence of some (awful) minigames and other bells and whistles do carry the implication that this was some kind of serious attempt at making a "game". The idea is that you need to buy more gumballs, which involves a character that looks like the villain "Two Face" from Detective Comic's famous "Batman" comic doing some really clunky, janky and unpolished platforming. This is not a good game.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
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.
Now on to pricing and value 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.
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 7 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?
This is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.
[b]Note: Joke reviews[/b]
As usual, with some of the worst games on Steam, all the comedians come out of the woodwork. The vast majority of the reviews for this game are joke reviews, mocking the game for just how bad it is. The comedians give us the usual "this game cured my cancer, saved my marriage, changed my life" story... sarcastic, but not useful if you want to know if the game is worth it.
Because most of the reviews are humorous but also insincere and not reflective of the actual quality of the product, the positive review score for this game should be taken with a grain of salt.
