"Reaping Rewards" is not a game. Games contain meaningful gamelike interaction and game loops, which are absent in this "art experience".
Instead of being a game, "Reaping Rewards" is a software application that presents a poorly made art exhibition.
This mildly interactive VR movie follows you as an apprentice Grim Reaper on your first day of training, where you are faced with difficult emotional decisions that challenge who you are and who you will become. It's badly written, the graphics are mediocre at best... and beyond some mild interaction this isn't really a game (the developer correctly avoids using the term game because they know full well it isn't one, it's an "interactive VR short narrative" which means it's not a bloody game).
We see this non-game trash on Steam when film school dropouts are hungry for any kind of validation (and they don't get any from formal art circles), so they dump their short film on Steam since no one views their junk on Youtube.
Steam used to have a video section, but it's deprecated and essentially shut down, so failed filmmakers just attempt to exploit the Steam games section instead. Why is this helpful for gamers? It isn't.
For those unfamiliar with what actually makes something a game, a "game loop" describes the interaction and feedback a gamer has when playing a game.
An obvious example of a game loop would be in games like Forza, where you drive a car in a circle. If you're faster and more skillful than the other drivers, you get rewarded for first place, then you find yourself back at the starting line for the next game loop iteration. Even open world/sandbox games like Minecraft feature a core game loop where you search for materials, use them to construct something, which rewards you in terms of increasing your progression and allowing you to repeat the next loop to get more and better materials. Those are game loops.
There's no such game loop here, no real interactive feedback. It is simply not a game, it cannot be "played".
This has been deceptively released in the "Games" section of Steam rather than the "Software" section. This is a frequent error for "developers" who are new to Steam, or fail to grasp the difference between games and non-game software. It appears this software listed as a game is just a result of zero experience or ignorance of the proper process.
Here's a link for the process to publish non-game software/non-game "art experiences" on Steam:
[url=https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithPublishing?issueid=925]Steam Developer Help With Software Publishing[/url]
It is a shame this process was ignored or misunderstood, leading to a non-game "art experience"/Youtube video being listed in the wrong category.
Uploading Youtube videos to the Steam Games section as if they are games is misleading to gamers and harmful, because it clutters the Steam store and steals visibility and traffic from real game developers who have done the right thing, and actually produced games for gamers.
There are no gameplay loops in this failed film school dropout project, no "gameplay", no significant game like interaction. Therefore, this has no value as a video game, and I cannot recommend this non-game to any gamer.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 9 concurrent players[/b]... a dismal public reception. Out of tens of millions of daily Steam logons, almost nobody bothered. Even though it's "free".
