Project: Ether

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"Project: Ether" is an LGBTQIA+ evangelism game pushing specific social agenda first, and being a game second. What do you do in the game? It's an extraordinarily badly made stealth game where you sneak around, avoiding gender dismorphia and evil robots while pretending you have magic powers. The game lacks polish and plays badly, but again, the primary purpose here was not to be a game. Whether we may or may not agree with the cause, it's my firm belief that politics and social agenda of any kind has no place in gaming. It does no service to gamers at all for political or social agenda to be shoved down our throats, no matter which side is doing the shoving. We're here to have fun, not get indoctrinated. Because the primary purpose of this product is totally unrelated to gaming, this really just makes gaming worse, and does nothing to further the developers political crusade. This is one of those things that gives amateur developers such a bad name. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. Despite not being in Early Access, it's obvious this is an incomplete product. Developers have an obligation to deliver complete, not partially done products to gamers, that shouldn't be controversial. Whatever the excuses may be, it does no service to gamers for incomplete products polluting Steam like this. It makes it harder for gamers to find complete games, and it makes it harder for ethical developers who do the right thing to find their audience. The graphics here are particularly awful, mismatched, extraordinarily low quality low poly assets, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment. 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. 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. Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 4 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this. 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? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.