"Maruja Mallo" is refreshingly advertised as a visual novel, but instead it's a game (technically, anyway). Usually it's the other way around and amateur authors try to push e-books onto Steam as games (and those e-books are always about the authors adventures with his imaginary anime girlfriends). This game is also refreshingly not about the authors imaginary girlfriend (I think).
Instead it's an interactive point and click adventure game about Maruja Mallo. Yeah, me too. So I looked it up, and she was an avant-garde/surrealist artist famous in the 1920s. Okay.
What do you do in the game? You read a lot of badly written e-book text but then you get some point and click puzzles where you get to interact with Maruja Mallo's most popular artworks. Or so I'm told, I guess we can take that as given.
It's difficult to call this a game, because of all the endless, badly written e-book/visual novel fanfiction text, which takes prime position in front of gameplay or anything PC gamers look for in a PC game. The "author" fails to grasp the important game design axiom, "Show, don't tell". You just get stuck reading walls of mediocre text, where they should have related the story through the mechanics of the game. My gaming PC is not an e-reader. We don't come to a shop for PC games looking for badly written fan-fictions.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.
Next is pricing and what value this has 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.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 2 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
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.
