Olive's Art-Venture

"Olive's Art-Venture" is more of a tech demo or concept bit than a real game. The idea is you "draw" simple shapes on a bit of paper at the side of the screen to cast spells while doing the usual kiting/bullet hell avoidance common with monster/wave survival games, and as usual just because an idea is novel doesn't mean it's good. The experimental part of the game, a terrible idea, is that you should use a tablet/stylus setup to do the drawing, which raises the question, if they had access to that kind of art gear, why is the game made up of lazy, ugly pixelcrap instead of actual art? We will probably never know. But, as always, gaming is a visual medium and no number of fake "community" reviews will change that reality. So, this features really godawful, lazy pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks bad because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things 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. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 5 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? 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.