"Over the Counter" is a badly made "tycoon" game at face value, although that's a bit generous... this game is more menus and clicking than actual gameplay. And it's less of a tycoon game and more of an almost FTL/Dead in Bermuda like number/stat platespinner where you just keep hitting "next" to get the next RNG event until the RNG kills your run... this is a pretty poor game design strategy even when it's backed up with a contemporary, state of the art technical delivery. The technical delivery here is so far away from "state of the art" it feels like a one-monkey, one-typewriter attempt at getting all of Shakespeare's works hammered out.
What do you do in the game? This is less like something you play and more like something you click through while random numbers and things get thrown about until the game ends. It's not fun.
This features really godawful 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 much worse than most other games 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.
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 well over 130 million gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
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.
As always games don't exist in a vacuum... if you want an actually decent pharma game, try "Big Pharma", "Pharmacy Simulator" or "Pharmacy Management Simulator" here on Steam, where the developers didn't phone the whole thing in.
