Magnesia

"Magnesia" is a badly made "me too" Portal ripoff, a first person puzzler that has you mucking around with magnets to solve the puzzles in each level... of which there are only two. This game wasn't ready for Early Access, it's more like a pre-alpha, and the developers walked away from it. It's buggy, unoptimised, short, and un-fun. What do you do in the game? First person puzzle solving ala Portal or Q.U.B.E, only worse. The developers abandoned this 6 years and 6 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games. The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers. The graphics aren't great, low effort/minimalist environments with (possibly flipped) low quality assets, and woefully bad optimisation. 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. This game is fairly dated at 6 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. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. Most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's usually some kind of monetisation, from nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, to 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. In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? I think it's best to skip this download. While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.