"Syzygy" is a very poorly made Sokoban ripoff with worse (pixelcrap) graphics and a weak gimmick where your map phases between a square, hex or triangle grid. Solving each level involves you moving between each form of the map to do the right moves to hit the exit point. That's all there is to this. In fact this is only remarkable because the developer was delusionally charging $20. Don't laugh, it's true, they really thought people would pay $20 for this.
This game fails on the visuals because of the use of incredibly lazy, ugly pixelcrap. The developer would probably argue this is a "deliberate artistic choice" but we all know it's because the developer was incapable of producing anything better. The game looks very poor compared to professionally developed games. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant; the choice detracts from the game. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's a disservice to gamers when developers don't bother doing their jobs and creating contemporary, high quality visuals. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are rare exceptions that succeeded [i]in spite[/i] of their awful graphics. Pixelcrap is never really okay, and there's no excuse for games that look this bad.
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.
There's no initial download price, but, as mentioned, the developer was charging $20 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
A peak of [b]7 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off.
