"Little Obedient Robot" is best described as an "experimental" game (which means, not a serious endeavour intended to have value for gamers). The experiment here is, after seeing several thousand garbage indie pixelcrap games fail hard on Steam, whether Steam gamers would enjoy yet another one. The answer, as the data shows, is "no". Isn't science wonderful?
What do you do in the game? More seriously, this is a pixelcrap hyrbid platformer and card based programming puzzle game. You build a deck of cards and arrange them in a specific order to program the robot. You drag and drop cards to create the commands. The robot then follows the programmed actions in the level, which then simulates a platformer "experience". Okay, in fairness, such a game could actually work if it was coupled with a high quality technical delivery. "Little Obedient Robot" was not.
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.
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.
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.
