"Hang Up" is a short and pointless narrative driven VR tech demo where you run an old-timey analog telephone exchange and connect callers to their recipients, and listen in as you do, wherein the trite little tech demo story is unravelled.
What do you do in the game? Not much, it's a very short experience and you'll spend most of your time just getting the thing to work with your VR headset. And even then only one controller will work, not both, because, you know, game jam.
That's right, game jam. This is not a sincerely made product, it was made for a game jam, which is a problem. It was done in a constrained period of time; professional game development takes years of effort from teams of talented and qualified people. A "game" slapped together in a weekend by an amateur simply isn't going to have any value for gamers, and that plays out clearly with this shovelware.
Also, products created in game jams were never intended for gamers, they exist only to stroke the ego of amateur developers who can't get a real job in the industry. When developers, especially untalented ones, put themselves before gamers, garbage like "Hang Up" is the inevitable result.
It's improper for shovelware like this to be published through Steam Direct, because it's harmful. This half-baked, rushed, non-professional product, not designed for gamers, is taking up space on the Steam store that should be given over to genuine, talented developers who do the right thing and make fully developed, not rushed products for gamers. This makes it harder for gamers like you and me to find these genuinely made products.
That plays out with the shoddy, janky, and sometimes downright broken technical delivery. Most VR headsets won't work. There's zero polish. This is unmaintained... just dumped on Steam as-is so the developer can feel good about himself.
The graphics aren't great, a single room with okay-ish placeholder graphical assets... but given it is just one room, who exactly are we going to impress here? Oh wait, of course, this is just for a game jam, so it doesn't "need" to meet any quality standards, right? Wrong. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and 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. You deserve better than compromises. But game jam crap is all compromise and no substance.
It's VR exclusive, and that shows the developer failed to understand the most basic axiom of VR game design... if the only cool thing about your product is VR support, your product is not cool.
This game is fairly dated at 7 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
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.
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?
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.
Because this is a game jam product and not a professionally, seriously developed game made for gamers, it's impossible to recommend.
