"Kyklos Code" is a formerly paid product, a first person puzzle game with an interesting twist that failed to garner any attention from gamers.
What do you do in the game? The idea is quite clever, even if it doesn't translate into a fun game experience. You'll do first person puzzle solving, but the gimmick is that you only have 10 seconds, then everything resets. However, within that 10 seconds of your Groundhog Day experience, you can change the state of various things in the game to be different in the next 10 seconds. So each cycle is a little difference, the box on the conveyor moves down a different path until eventually you solve your way through the puzzle game. Definitely a novel and clever idea but it's a shame it didn't become a game people wanted to play.
The graphics aren't great, minimalist low poly neon garbage. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
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 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.
On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $6 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.
Furthermore, the developer has their hand out for a $5 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to give them money for soundtrack DLC (that's already in the game, and also sounds completely awful instead of the chill ambient music you should instead get) from Steam to "support" the "developer"... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 7 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
Give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.
Remember what I often say... if you don't agree with what I've said about this game, by all means add it to your library and play it. My review is just here to inform your decision, and if you think I was wrong and you downloaded the game, then I've done what I really wanted to do... inform your decision.
