Pizza Synthwave

Pros: $3 (I bought it for $1). Steam Achievement support. 30 levels (More than an hour & 30 minutes worth). A grappling hook you can use to slingshot long distances. In-game leaderboards to help you speedrun. Cons: Can only access leaderboards at the end of a level. Can't restart a level without going into the level select.

"Pizza Synthwave" is a simple, shallow, and pointless parkour platformer where you jump around some minimalist neon platforms to reach the end while listening to a really bad attempt to make synthwave music. I know it says pizza in the name, that's just because the end thingy of each level is a slice of badly rendered pizza. That's really all there is to this. Needless to say it was a massive failure on Steam Direct. The graphics aren't great, minimalist low poly neon crap. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 USD for this. That comes across as a bit delusional. 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 3 concurrent players[/b]... 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? What's the verdict? This is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time. There are over 140,000 games on Steam, not every one of them is a hidden gem. I'm here to help gamers find the ones that actually matter in that sea of Steam Direct self-published mess. If you don't agree with my findings in this review, you should definitely download it and play it to see for yourself. I'm happy to have helped you make an informed choice, regardless of the outcome.