Little Helper is a low key asset flip, a bunch of other people's assets assembled badly to make a basic game, typically this kind of thing is done by amateur developers without sufficient budget, talent and/or staff to do the job of game development professionally. It's then quickly rushed into Steam Direct. And, unsurprisingly, this never results in a product with any quality, interest, or value for gamers.
This is a family friendly adventure game with a Christmas/North Pole theme. You're tasked with saving Christmas, but the story is disappointingly generic. Pumpking and his minions are taking over the North Pole. The gameplay involves traversing the North Pole and eliminating Pumpking's minions to save Christmas, mostly through fetch quests etc.
So, the game might look better than you'd expect from an amateur project, but this is because it's partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Very little in this game is truly the creation of the "developer", it's just a bunch of rearranged assets.
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "Little Helper".
This game is fairly dated at 6 years old... it's showing a bit of age and won't give you a very up-to-date gaming experience.
It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging a whopping $7 USD for this. Yep, trying to get YOUR money for someone else's game assets. This is never acceptable.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. It's also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who paid money for this... nobody got refunded.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 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?
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.
