Malum Escape

"Malum Escape" is is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Malus". Malus is an almost certainly asset flipped/kitbashed attempt to make a co-op horror experience. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Malus, 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 "Malum Escape" too. This advertisement is a small subset of the main "Malus" product they are advertising and features nothing but a bunch of game assets and a series of godawful keypad "puzzles". I've seen other developers refer to this as "puzzleslop", a term I hadn't heard in over 19,000 game reviews on Steam, but it checks out, I guess. Mass produced, low effort, stock asset minimum viable products... I'm going to stick with calling these things asset flips, but assetslop/puzzleslop will work if that helps you guys make sense of all these bad games (and advertisements for bad games). What a time to be alive, and be a gamer. The purpose of this advertisement is to get you to shell out a whopping $5 USD on buying Malus, 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. 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. 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.