The Exaggerated Epoch of Edward O'Hare

[h1]Before I played The Exaggerated Epoch of Edward O'Hare, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good[/h1]

3edward5ohare

"The Exaggerated Epoch of Edward O'Hare" is at least a genuinely made game, even if the quality is atrocious. No flipped assets, no cash shop, a genuinely made game for a change. It's amazing how rare that is on Steam, unfortunately. 140,000 games... yeah, not all of them are legit. In fact, most of them aren't. What do you do in the game? This is a rather poorly made third person brawler with a bit of a narrative drive. You play as Edward O'Hare reliving his younger years with his son and grandson. The story transforms mundane tales into "larger than life epics". The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers. The graphics aren't great, really low quality stuff slapped out with Blender in the space of an afternoon or something. That's 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. 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 7 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? What's the verdict? 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.