Maze And Dagger

I always felt like my labyrinth-solving skills were far beyond the challenges offered by average commercial games. Not any more!

"Maze And Dagger" is an abandoned Early Access first person maze action/puzzle/adventure game that was dumped in an incomplete state by the developer. It was abandoned roughly 5 years ago. The developer kept all money taken from gamers despite reneging on his committment to deliver the game. In an additional insult to injury, the developer then made the game "free", since he'd already gotten his money for an incomplete game. Unethical? You bet. Anyway this is a clunky, disastrous mess... I'm not sure how much of an asset flip it is, but it sure looks like at least a bit of that is happening, too. Avoid at all costs. The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $15 USD for this. 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. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.