The Depths of Avalon

"The Depths of Avalon" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from Butler Community College. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. This is just a really mediocre dungeon crawler/ARPG with no content or interest, a minimum viable product student thing. I'm concerned that the game assets look like they might be flipped, but there's no evidence of that one... either way they look bad and this student project doesn't offer anything more than most asset flips do, anyway. It's all about what's valuable to us gamers, and here, that's nothing. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. You cannot play this without a console peasant children's toy. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. 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 7 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Since this is more of a student tech demo than a full, genuinely made game for gamers, and offers no Steam features, like a +1 to your game count, I can't recommend downloading this over a full, professionally made game, of which there are thousands here on Steam.

Short fun game