"Squared Up" is an unusual but at least genuinely made 2D retro pixel top down puzzle game. No flipped assets, no AI slop, real, genuinely done game development. Unfortunately good intentions alone are not enough to make what we might call a stellar PC gaming experience, and this game was an objective failure for reasons we'll get into.
What do you do in the game? There's a welcome assortment of 2D top down puzzle types wrangled into one game here. Indeed, game conceptualisation was not the issue here.. I'd go so far as to say this was an okay idea implemented badly (even for the deprecated 2D space, games like "Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack" blow this away completely in terms of technical presentation.
So the gameplay involves top down puzzle work, and these take the form of familiar 2D puzzles, there's a bit of Sokoban, a bit of Khet, and a few other colour matching/shape changing obstacle courses to negotiate, but the problem is all of that work designing levels was completely wasted because the technical delivery here is so poor.
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.
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 4 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
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.
