Hidden Chibis in Combinis is one of literally hundreds of simple, minimalist 2D line art "Find 100 Hidden turnips" or whatever games... hunt through a simple illustration to find 100 hidden things. The first time I saw one of these I thought it was a fairly okay, if short experience... but the problem is, there's literally hundreds of these plaguing the store. They're fairly low effort when you think about what's needed to make a more genuine game.
The whole thing could have been done in a web browser. We have to ask if Steam was intended to compete with Firefox, Chrome or Safari. I didn't spend thousands building a gaming rig so I could play glorified browser games.
The other problem is just how many of these there are... they're practically spamming the Steam store at this point. It's close to pollution... mass produced slop that genuine game developers have to try to compete with to get visibility for their more seriously developed games. And that's not good for gamers, or for real developers.
This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this.
On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes 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, or something you might want to spend your time on.
Despite having no up-front cost, this 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.
