Katto: Rising Tides

"Katto: Rising Tides" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from ESAT in Spain. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. "Katto", at face value, looks like a triple-A console platformer, the students knocked it out of the park there. But the problem is that this is just that... a student project, and an incomplete one at that. Obviously there's ZERO motivation for students to continue working on their class assignment after they graduate and move on... once more highlighting this huge problem with all these homework assignments being published on Steam Direct. This isn't good for gamers and it's not good for professional (and, heck, even amateur) developers who make full projects and hope to get visibility. They have to compete with this stuff! What would you do in this student project (if it was finished)? The feline deity Kathsa has given gems to each of the five cities. These gems are stolen by the Nari, requiring you to recover them and restore peace. Gameplay involves jumping, dashing, climbing walls, and defeating enemies. There's only three levels. The developers abandoned this 10 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games. The graphics in this game are really quite good, which at least makes the game look more appealing. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use. 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, like this case, where it's a project made for students, not for you. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. 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? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.