"Sobreviva Ziggy!" is an extremely poor quality "game" intended to educate children about seahorses. Personally I think if parents force their kids to play pixelcrap games, that's child abuse.
What do you do in the game? Simple arcade gameplay, 2D side view action avoidance, and learning some things about seahorses that nobody cares about. This isn't making seahorse education better, but it is making gaming worse.
There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal.
The lack of customizable controls is a significant drawback. This decision makes the game potentially unplayable for gamers with physical disabilities, left-handed players, or those using non-QWERTY keyboard layouts like AZERTY.
The technical execution of this game is shallow and simplistic, just enough to tick the boxes required to get something (anything) published on Steam, rather than investing the huge amount of effort and budget needed to create a fully fledged, comprehensive, high quality product. This feels like a tech demo more than a full game.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" 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.
I'm not sure if this is an asset flip, but it's one of those cases where the assets just look much better than the rest of the quality of the game... a glaring inconsistency. There's no evidence, but as always, the biggest problem with asset flips besides the plagiarism is the deplorably low quality of the other aspects of the game, and even if the game assets are genuinely created for the game, the quality of the rest of the game is indistinguishable from that of asset flips.
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.
This was made with the godawful "GameMaker Studio" construction kit/toolset, which is popular amongst amateur developers because it handholds you through making really crap 2D games that you can publish for $100 on Steam Direct. This lets you pat yourself on the back for pretending to be a real game developer, which explains why GameMaker Studio is responsible for so much ignored garbage on Steam.
GameMaker Studio has never really been used to make a truly successful game, but that doesn't stop people from trying and failing. It's a particularly bad game engine that can only be used for making low quality 2D products. Like this. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old saying goes. Another reason this particular game wasn't successful.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us 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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this 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 game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
I can't recommend this, it's not worth downloading even if it's "free". Games don't exist in a vacuum... Steam gamers have literally thousands of better choices.
