"Pushing Through..." 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 platformer differentiates from most garbage platformers in two ways. Firstly, despite not being made up of godawful pixelcrap, it still does look awful. Secondly, there's a block pushing gimmick that makes this a little bit of a Sokoban-lite/platformer hybrid... this mechanism is poorly implemented and un-fun to engage with.
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.
Visually, this features mediocre hand drawn style "Baby's First Wacom Tablet"/MS-Paint art instead of contemporary graphics, and sloppy animations to go along with them. This obviously looks better than pixelcrap, but that's a really low bar to barely stumble over. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks worse than a professionally made game would look, and that's a major deterrent.
This game is fairly dated at 7 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
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.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 9 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?
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.
