"Pellet Packer: Micro Munch" is a bit of weird pointless shovelware on Steam. The developer stole likenesses and characters from Bandai-Namco's copyrighted and trademarked Pac-Man franchise and tried to make a game with those characters. The primary purpose of this game seems to be to find out how hard Bandai's legal department can hit. After all, it's not only morally and creatively bankrupt to steal other people's intellectual property, in some places in the world it's also a violation of criminal laws. So this only exists here on Steam until the laywers show up.
What do you do in the game? This is a collection of 5 game modes where you control Pac-Man, but the gimmick is the developer made the controls bad on purpose. This is one of the worst kinds of game design. Games should be challenging because the content and gameplay are designed well and test the skill of the gamer, they should feel intuitive and enjoyable to play. This game designer went in completely the wrong direction on that, and as a result this is thoroughly unpleasant to play.
This feels more like a tech demo or a project smacked together hurriedly to try make a kind of minimum viable product just good enough to pass the developers unambitious idea and shove it into Steam Direct to see if you can actually pay $100 and publish junk through Steam Direct. Yeah, you can. Is this good for gamers? Nope.
This game fails on the visuals because of the use of incredibly lazy, ugly pixelcrap. The developer would probably argue this is a "deliberate artistic choice," but we all know it's because the developer was incapable of producing anything better. The game looks poor compared to professionally developed titles. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant; the choice detracts from the game. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's a disservice to gamers when developers don't bother doing their jobs and creating contemporary, high quality visuals. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are rare exceptions that succeeded [i]in spite[/i] of their awful graphics. Poor visuals are never acceptable.
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.
SteamDB shows this only ever had a peak player count of ONE person... just one guy (having a bad time). Maybe that was just the developer himself. When I ran this up to review it, I personally matched the peak player count for the game. Just me. That's painfully bad reception... everyone on Steam ignored this (and there's over 130,000,000 gamers on Steam and up to 42 million gamers logged on at any given time). Just one player peak. That is epic failure. Even though this is "free". If this isn't good enough for everyone else on the planet, it's not good enough for you, either.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
Nope. There's no up front cost here, but I still feel like I got ripped off, and I didn't even spend any money. That's how bad this is.
