Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort 2D platformers, and "Inops" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 17,000 platformers on Steam, almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes. This is not one of the good ones (but also not the complete worst), despite being a Nintendo Switch game that was ported to PC. Take a look at your gaming rig. That's a nice RTX 5090, isn't it? And yet they expect you to pretend it's a Nintendo Switch. See why we have a problem here?
This game borrows (plagiarises) the visual styles of Microsoft's Limbo and World of Goo, but provides a puzzle platformer experience with an interesting gimmick, in that you collect little black spots and get them all to the exit. There's a lot of precision platforming and tightly controlled timing that ultimately makes this a little too difficult and annoying to play.
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.
Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone.
The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse.
This game is fairly dated at 6 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 onto pricing and value.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $10 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.
You can always judge a game by how popular it is with the general public. Steam has over 130 million unique gamers, and over 40 million unique logons every day from dedicated PC gamers. But this only ever had a peak player count of a dozen or so people... that's very poor public reception. Gamers rejected this, most likely due to the reasons I supply in this review.
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? What's the verdict?
This one scores a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher quality alternatives on Steam. Ultimately if there was a "maybe" option in Steam reviews I would use that for this game, but there isn't, so I can't.
There are over 140,000 games on Steam, not every one of them is a hidden gem. I'm here to help gamers find the ones that actually matter in that sea of Steam Direct self-published mess. If you don't agree with my findings in this review, you should definitely download it and play it to see for yourself. I'm happy to have helped you make an informed choice, regardless of the outcome.
