Rocket Ghost Aidan 2

the best game that no one plays

Rocket Ghost Aidan 2 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 is one of the worst platformers on Steam, and given just how many there are, this is really a major achievement. Clunky controls match perfectly with the godawful graphics (were they done in MS-Paint?) 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. On the topic of visuals, the weak looking 2D retro assets seem like they'd be more at home in a browser game or a mobile app. 3D graphics accelerators hit the mainstream of PC gaming in the mid 1990's with cards like the ATI Rage and Voodoo3D, there's no excuse for such poor 2D graphics in 2025. That alone is enough to disqualify this for recommendation. You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $5 USD for this. The fact that they thought this would be worth actual real money provides more entertainment than the game itself. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt. 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.