"HALP!" is a short but pleasant enough VR puzzle game. Help a steampunkish space pirate captain escape from being stranded by waving your arms around with VR controllers. I mean, that's the experience you wanted when you got a VR headset, right?
Normally the somewhat shallow experience in the game plus the poor comparison to non-VR games would be a dealbreaker, but the pricing here gives a lot of leeway. You get a lot here for not a lot, and that's a compelling value proposition.
The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things 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.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. Part of that is probably due to the VR requirement rather than general rejection from gamers.
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?
Yes, believe it or not. While this is far from a perfect game, the deficiencies and drawbacks can be overlooked due to the zero up front price and the value you get out of it. It's greater than the sum of its parts, and worth downloading if you're a fan of this kind of gaming experience.
