Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort 2D platformers, and "Spiders Everywhere" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 17,000 platformers on Steam, almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes. This is not one of the good ones.
This is an unusual retro-art platformer (and I mean REAL retro art, not pixelcrap) in a similar era style to Bendy and the Ink Machine, and the artwork itself comes across as fully authentic. Unfortunately the gameplay doesn't match... this is of course as the title suggests, a platformer that adopts early 20th century animated film cartoon artwork. You control a baby and you have to platform around some spiders. Okay!
This feels like a case of an artist doing the whole game... the art is passable but the rest of the game isn't (usually it's the other way around and developers who can't do art try to do the art anyway and we get pixelcrap). Unfortunately the platforming gameplay is just jank, with poor hitboxes, poor overall gameplay and a bit of headscratching because beyond the okayish, authentic looking art, there's not much reason to put yourself through playing this.
Ultimately, artwork aside, this is a tired, outdated experience from a tired, outdated and obsolete game genre. Just a couple of platformers out of literally thousands have any appeal for gamers lately (Super Meat Boy, Hollow Knight etc). This "me too" Steam Direct platformer in a crowded genre offers nothing new. It's "free", but [i]free[/i] doesn't mean [i]good.[/i]
The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better.... artwise they are okay, animations could be better, and motion and movement is horribly janky. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.
Next is pricing and what value this has 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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free, that was a dismal public reception. But if you take into account the problems I bring up in this review, it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
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?
This one scores a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher quality alternatives on Steam. Keep an eye on the artist though, hopefully they will go on to work with a dedicated game development team and create something big.
