Intrepid is a "short" (if you follow a walkthrough) first person adventure/"Escape Room" game made with Godot. You're on a spaceship and must escape, in order to do so you need to interact with the environment and find various codes that unlock further puzzles until you can eventually get on a spaceship and leave. There's probably about 4-5 puzzles in total, if you know what you're doing you can complete this in under 5 minutes, making this more of a demo/showcase than an actual serious game. That's fair as it's being given away for free.
I think the first really notable thing about this game is that it's made with Godot, but unlike 99.99999% of Godot games on Steam it doesn't look like hot garbage. Turns out Godot is a bit of a Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde thing, and has a not completely terrible 3D engine. The people who did the graphics for this game, well, I hope they go on to bigger and better things. Not to say this is perfect... while this very short game came so close to a very rare thumbs up from me, the developers goofed on a couple of very basic technical implementation requirements that make this unrecommendable. But first, assuming you can overlook the technical problems, the other killer here is general game design. The puzzles? Very good. But the interface? Awful. The developers apparently decided that puzzles needed to be locked behind incomprehensibly annoying UI... there's a few panels and switches you need to access but can't. It's not clear why. The solution? Usually something like a tiny little square button that's indistinguishable from the rest of the environment. Like finding a needle in a haystack, except instead of needing to find a shiny metal needle, it's another piece of hay you have to look for. This is not good game design. The UI should not be the players enemy.
That aside, while the game kind of looks ok (and for a Godot game, it looks spectacular.. yes, I don't like Godot, but that's because I've played hundreds of extremely crap Godot games and I know the damage it's allowed amateur developers to cause to the gaming industry, it's almost as bad as GameMaker Studio), it's technically flawed with some deep defects.
Controls are locked and can't be customised... this is not okay and it can prevent some gamers, especially differently-abled gamers, from playing the games. PC games must have proper customisability. Especially because of the design flaws around the game UI.
The same is true for for the graphics settings. There's a couple of limited performance options, but no customisable resolution, so there's no way to make sure the game displays properly on any given monitor. That's not okay. Apparently the game didn't display properly in fullscreen if you have a high DPI monitor, and the developers never bothered to test their game so they didn't know about it. Their solution, unacceptably, is to edit your registry and put a DPI bypass for the game permanently into your registry. This is really, really, really NOT OK. Developers must never pollute the systems their games run on in this way. The correct solution must be part of the game settings and configuration. This hamfisted bandaid may end up causing more harm than good. Maybe that's a limitation of Godot, but if that's the case, it just hammers down my ongoing argument that you can't make acceptable games with crap game engines.
The game, while short, is completely free. Nothing speaks more to a developers belief in themselves and their product than making their game available for everyone without remuneration. This is certainly a gesture that shows dedication to the gaming industry. It's a shame in this case that the implementation is below the minimum standards a dedicated PC game should offer to enthusiasts. There's no "maybe" option in Steam, unfortunately, but I hope to see more work from this developer, perhaps as part of a professional game development company that can make full use of their talents without needing to make budget/quality compromises.
