Searching for the term "platformer" on Steam gives you over 17,000 results... there's thousands and thousands of garbage tier platformers infesting Steam. "PY-ONEERS" fits right into that category of retro 2D shovelware glutting the Steam store. Only a tiny number of those are any good, and this isn't one of them.
This was an attempt to make an educational platformer where the platforming is interspersed with puzzles that require some basic Python coding skill to solve... yeah, that's it. This is one of those things that doesn't make learning Python better, but it does make gaming worse.
The platforming genre is pretty much obsolete... just a tiny number of professionally developed platformers exist on PC and offer any real value or interest to gamers (Silksong, etc). This is nowhere near being as good as Hollow Knight or Silksong. Even without a price tag, it's easy to see why gamers ignored this in favor of modern, professionally developed 3D games. This is offering nothing new or interesting, so it's easy to see why this failed.
The developers gave up on this 11 months ago. It's destined to remain unfinished. This junkware is just polluting Steam and making it difficult for gamers to fully finished, completed games. That's not good for gamers.
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 very poor compared to professionally developed games. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant, this looks bad because of that developer decision. 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. Pixelcrap is never really okay, and there's no excuse for games that look this bad.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers.
Most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's usually some kind of monetisation, from nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, to any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 4 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
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.
