Microwave Yourself

"Microwave Yourself" is a weird and pointless VR tech demo, trying to be more "art" than game and go viral by having a wacky premise, rather than offering anything of real value to gamers. What do you do in the game? The idea of this game is you put various things that you should [b]NEVER[/b] put in a microwave into a microwave... yeah, that's it. The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 30 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download. The graphics aren't great, low quality, probably asset flipped assets and ugly general visual style. 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. It's VR exclusive, and that shows the developer failed to understand the most basic axiom of VR game design... if the only cool thing about your product is VR support, your product is not cool. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 4 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library? This is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time. Edit: The developer breached Valve guidelines to insist this is not an asset flip, which is weird because I didn't say it was, I just said it looked indistinguishable from one. Let's take the developers cancerous response at face value (gamers, you need to know, asset flippers lie... if this guy stole other people's assets, he's not going to admit it, he'll double down and say they're his assets). In that case... he made assets that look, at best, the same as assets stolen from an asset store, and now he wants to be as famous as Digital Homicide for dumping valueless garbage on the store? Only not technically an asset flip (if he's telling the truth about that??) Whew. Way to dig a hole. If you can believe the developer, or not, either way, this has all the qualities of asset flip garbage.