"Something for Someone Else" is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
The primary purpose of this game is not to be a game, and whenever this is done, it always ends in disaster. This is an incredibly self obsessed, pretentious ego trip where the developer supplies an "art experience" about his mental health issues, framed in the format of one of the worst platformers ever made.
Sure, games can be art, art is where the pinnacle of creativity meets the pinnacle of technical craftsmanship. The Mona Lisa wouldn't be hanging in the Louvre if she was done with crayons on a beer coaster. It has to stand up as a game, and this doesn't, with crappy visuals accompanied by even worse gameplay, janky controls, sloppy hitboxes... it's obvious no serious playtesting was done, no optimization or polish applied before this was rushed onto Steam Direct.
Trying to address social issues through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good. Game developers are not professionals in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this can cause far more harm than good. It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to push political or social agendas. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get sales by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.
The graphics aren't great. Hand drawn on cardboard and scanned in 2D garbage, that will understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and 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 deserve better than compromises.
These flaws make this game fall far short of the professional standards we expect from a modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 0 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you download this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ products on Steam?
Nope, it barely counts as a game and it looks and plays awful.
