self-indulgence

"self-indulgence" is an action adventure/horror game that's basically a lightweight ripoff of the OG "Alone in the Dark" game where you get a camera looking down at each room you're in and you move awkwardly around, interact with stuff, sometimes shoot stuff, and plod through a rather poorly written fan-fiction tier narrative. I know the purpose is to pretend to be a 20 year old Playstation game lookalike, but the problem is, it's not 20 years ago, and we're not console peasants. Developers should at least try to read the room before publishing garbage on Steam... or better yet, before they waste all the effort on making garbage nobody wants (I'm not kidding, either, check the player counts below). The graphics here are particularly awful, godawful low poly pixelcrap garbage, 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. 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. 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. A peak of [b]4 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game. 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? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.