Pellet Packer: Cookie Crunch

"Pellet Packer: Cookie Crunch" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This incredibly bad pixelcrap platformer is notable for copyright infringement as the developer outright stole and used without permission the Pac-Man intellectual property (copyright Namco/Bandai 1980). Copyright infringement is a crime. In some parts of the world this can lead to criminal fines of up to $250,000 USD and up to 5 years in prison. This game only exists on Steam until legal action is taken by the copyright holder. So, is this copyright infringement delivering any kind of real game? No. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. The technical execution of this game is shallow and simplistic, just enough to tick the boxes required to get something (anything) published on Steam, rather than investing the huge amount of effort and budget needed to create a fully fledged, comprehensive, high quality product. This feels like a tech demo more than a full game. The use of low-resolution, ugly pixelcrap here is dishonestly presented as a "deliberate artistic choice", but we all know it's because the developer wasn't capable of anything better. The result is a visually unappealing game, especially when compared to thousands of professionally developed games here. Whether the developer lacked the talent for modern visuals or the money to hire an artist is irrelevant. This choice significantly detracts from the game... gaming is a visual medium. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are incredibly rare exceptions that made it [i]in spite[/i] of the pixelcrap holding them back (imagine how much better they would be if the graphics didn't suck). Pixelcrap is never okay. 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. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak user count was only ONE person. That's right, only one person ever used this at a time. When I tried this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak user count for the product. OUCH. The only user activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. 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. I didn't pay money, but I still feel ripped off.