"Kane's Shadow" is a godawful train wreck, it's Dance Dance Revolution meets freelance armchair psychology from an esteemed mental healthcare... haha, no, the developer is unqualified for the job he's trying to do here. Also, wow, some of the worst MS-Paint "art" I've ever seen. Truly an unmitigated disaster (and a waste of that $100 Steam Direct fee).
Trying to address serious issues such as mental and emotional health through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good.
The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful.
It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to address mental health issues. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers.
People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get attention/fame by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.
In terms of visuals, this features really godawful MS-Paint tier "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. The deplorably bad visuals here come across as an insult to gamers.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
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.
Even though this is "free", it 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
