Midnight Riff

"Midnight Riff" is an incredibly bad rhythm/QTE game (think Dance Dance Revolution but awful) taken from the design perspective of someone who doesn't understand the primary point of these games is to learn the songs and moves, and thus cleverly replaced all such content with mindless, soulless, repetitive procgen. You know how amateur developers often think procgen is "ezmode" for content creation? This is a great example that proves why they're wrong. So this really only has one job and it failed... hitreg and repsonsiveness is unpolished and janky, where in this genre they need to be beyond precise. That's a big failure on top of an already incredibly weak technical delivery. So it's no wonder this was a huge failure on Steam Direct. The amateur pixelcrap visual presentation here at best could have been an attempt to use "retro" as a crutch, a weak excuse to avoid admitting the developer wasn't capable of doing the job of a game developer this decade and creating cutting edge, high quality 3D visuals. While a lack of skill or funding is the explanation for this failure, it's no excuse. The end result of this incompetence is a game that looks dramatically inferior to professionally developed games. Terraria and Undertale succeeded [i]despite[/i] looking crap, not [i]because[/i] they look crap. The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work. As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here. 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. A peak of [b]5 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game. 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.