Of Moons and Mania

"Of Moons and Mania" is not really a game, it's a frankly stupid "art experience" where you follow the bouncing ball through conversation notes to relay a crappy arthouse e-book about depression and mental health problems. I feel depressed when I see just how much non-game garbage like this there is on Steam. What do you do in the game? Not much, it's mostly just watching the crappy dialogue... there's nothing here for actual gamers. But Steam is for actual gamers, so this is a big problem. Trying to address serious issues such as mental and emotional health through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good. The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful. It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to address mental health issues. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get attention/fame by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here. It's difficult to call this a game; it feels less like an entertainment product and more like a digital art exhibit trying to pass itself off as a game. What negligible gameplay there is serves only as a flimsy excuse to pass this off as a game when gameplay wasn't the developers intention... and that's a problem. We're here for games. It's true that games can be art, of course... art is where the pinnacle of creativity, craftsmanship and expertise come together to form something greater than the sum of its parts. This product does a poor job of all of those three. The Mona Lisa would not be hanging in the Louvre if she was drawn as a stick figure in crayon on a napkin. So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem too. This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this. 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 3 concurrent players[/b]... 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? I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.