"Lesson Learned: Cult of the Elizabeth" is is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Lesson Learned". Lesson Learned is an X-box ported tower defense game with 2.5D graphics and some hybrid gameplay where you move around a bit on screen as well as sorting out resources and plonking down towers. It's from Poland and it makes you wonder if they know about ethical game publication there or not.
But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Lesson Learned, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Lesson Learned: Cult of the Elizabeth" too.
The purpose of this advertisement is to get you to shell out a whopping $10 USD on buying Lesson Learned, and I don't recommend you do that either.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time.
It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos
While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace.
It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at less than 100 concurrent users... they couldn't even break three figures! Even though it's free, it's a dismal reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.
