Thousands of retro 2D platformers are infesting Steam, and "Imperil" is just more pollution in a crowded market of terrible games. There are over 17,000 platformers on Steam, literally thousands (you can go see for yourself if you search for the platformer tag on the store, I'm not kidding). And this is far from being one of the best of those.
This is a bit of junkware that failed badly on Steam Direct... for a few obvious reasons. The developers unabashedly stole the "dark foreground" art style from Microsoft's Limbo, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of creative bankruptcy here. The rest of the game is just crap assets plastered on a Construct platformer game blueprint.
If you play the game, which nobody should (or did), it's a garbage tier platformer brawler with no real interest beyond a badly used object movement gimmick.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?"
While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't.
This game fails on the visuals because of the use of incredibly lazy, ugly pixelcrap. The developer would probably argue this is a "deliberate artistic choice" but we all know it's because the developer was incapable of producing anything better. The game looks very poor compared to professionally developed games. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant; the choice detracts from the game. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's a disservice to gamers when developers don't bother doing their jobs and creating contemporary, high quality visuals. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are rare exceptions that succeeded [i]in spite[/i] of their awful graphics. Pixelcrap is never really okay, and there's no excuse for games that look this bad.
This game is fairly dated at 9 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.
This was made with the utterly awful "Construct" game construction kit... this is a "no-code" construction kit where you just drag and drop stuff and fiddle with a few menus to make primitive, minimum viable product games. That explains to some extent why this is so bad... no-code toys like Construct let anyone, especially people who aren't qualified to and should probably never make games, make them anyway. Combine this with the zero-QA "Steam Direct" program, and you can start to see why there's so much junk on Steam.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $2 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 4 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
Definitely not. No up front price, but I still feel ripped off.
