Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort 2D platformers, and "labyrinth Trials" 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.
This one is an obvious ripoff of Metroid kitbashed out of Unity with a bunch of "borrowed" pixelcrap art assets, making this a low key asset flip. There's a focus on speedrunning, but it's best to take this as Metroid but so much worse in every respect that not even Temu would try to sell it.
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.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "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. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 USD for this. No pixelcrap is worth five bucks, but this was more a case of someone trying to get YOUR money for game assets made by someone else (real developers like Ansimuz etc).
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.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 4 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Nope. I didn't have to pay for this, but I still feel like I got scammed.
