Shiki

Love this game. the Art, Story, everything is 100/10 <3

"Shiki" is a somewhat poorly made 2.5D point and click adventure where you help out a boy who becomes the keeper of a small, barren star, touching the memories of those who lived there, which doesn't make a lot of sense, but then we shouldn't expect too much. Narrative aside, the technical delivery is incredibly weak and was a leading cause of this product failing. What do you do in the game? Walk around, point and click through a few puzzles, get bombarded with poorly written, endless VR text because the developer didn't understand the "Show, don't tell" axiom of game development. This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" textures on low poly assets, instead of real graphics. 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 much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. This game is fairly dated at 6 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. 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. 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 3 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? 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.