"Pearl Fishery: Quest for the Mega Pearl" is like it says on the box, a "coin pusher", the type you see in casinos and other gambling establishments, you know where there's a machine with a bunch of coins, and if you drop some coins in, maybe more coins will drop off the table than you put in (but we all know the house always wins). The best part about this is that it's NOT an attempt to shoehorn gambling onto Steam (it's very bad when this happens). Indeed, this is apparently from someone who really likes the mechanics of coin pushing machines. Well, I guess there's an afficionado for everything under the sun.
What do you do in the game? Instead of coins, you're lobbing pearls at the shaking table, and you need to get a certain number of pearls and bonus blocks... this looks like it was intended to be a somewhat more sophisticated game designed for mobile phones, maybe with a cash shop of course to encourage people to treat the game like gamling, but I couldn't find it on app stores. Instead, it's a rather short and bland experience here on PC.
While I couldn't find this on the mobile app stores, everything about it looks and feels like it's a mobile app designed for mobile phones... for PC gaming enthusiasts, it's not going to give you a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That alone is enough to disqualify this from any recommendation. We don't spend thousands building gaming rigs so that we can pretend they're iPhones and play iPhone games and mobile apps.
The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 20 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download.
On the important subject of visuals, this features fairly low quality stylised/cartoony low poly 3D graphics. It comes across as the kind of thing you see on mobile phones and Nintendo games, which will deter a lot of PC gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and to be considered one of the best games on Steam, the graphics have to be some of the best on Steam. That's not happening here.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $2 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
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.
