"HeadLight" is a rather poorly made first person horror jumpscare game. I don't think this one is an asset flip because the assets look terrible. It's short and comes across as more of a tech demo or a homework assignment than a professional attempt to make a game.
This features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's clear the developers behind this didn't understand that.
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 only 2 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?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
Certainly one of the weirdest breaches of Valve's guidelines but the developer is (unsurprisingly) in error about a few things.
I didn't play the game all the way to the end because it's garbage. If there's any "emotiveness" in my review it's exasperation at yet another badly made game on Steam.
If the most popularity the game ever had was a non-ebrity streamer that nobody ever heard of played the game once and found it was so bad that [i]the peak player count remained at only 2 people[/i] then it's a catastrophic failure. Or to put it in terms the developer would understand, this turned out to be as effective as telling Lots wife not to turn around. Usually when popular streamers play terrible games they at least get some popularity bump from people also playing the game because the youtube man told them to. Didn't happen here.
Finally, there is no god.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
