Pearl Dream

"珍珠梦" is misleadingly described as an adventure game but really it's more of a mildly interactive Visual Novel/E-book. Once more, an amateur developer exhumes the corpse of HP Lovecraft to make everyone question whether Disney was right about the public domain being a bad thing. I swear, the number of Lovecraft worsening amateur games (and in this case E-books) on Steam is getting a bit painful. Anyway this one has you wandering around some medieval environment and wishing you weren't. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs to pretend they're mobile phones or Commodore 64s. 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 book peaked at only 4 concurrent readers... 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.