Ho-Ho-Maze!

[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url] The marketing material for this game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated slop.[/quote] "Ho-Ho-Maze!" is a casual, point-and-click puzzle game. You're tasked with guiding Santa's reindeer through a maze while avoiding wolves. The gameplay centers around navigating the maze, leading reindeer to Santa's sleigh, and avoiding the wolves, which becomes progressively harder as more reindeer follow Santa. There's only 10 levels, making this more of a tech demo than any real sincere effort to make a game for gamers. The low poly "Minecraft" looking visuals are a deterrent, and it looks like some of it might be asset flipped from asset packs like Kubikos cube world etc, intended for mobile phones. And as always, we have the problem where developers see Minecraft was a success but don't or can't understand why, so they rip off Minecraft's art style, thinking Minecraft succeeded because it had bad graphics, and thus they should also succeed because their game also looks bad. Developers must learn that Minecraft succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too, and that's glaringly obvious here. 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. On pricing, this is "free" enough, 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. AI slop has that effect. 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam, and the use of AI slop in the marketing material is a serious, problematic insult to gamers and real creators everywhere.