This is yet another student project, one of literally thousands self-published on Steam Direct. It's from Sahmyook University in South Korea. This is an academic exercise, not a professional game. While it has more quality than most amateur games, it is not a complete gaming experience. Student projects have limited value for gamers because they're not fully developed games, just barely functional demos that show the students progress.
Steam is not a place for for-profit colleges to dump student homework assignments... and having thousands of these is not good for gamers.
The students made one of those "repeating level" escape rooms... basically you're stuck on the 8th floor of a library and when you think you get out you're back there but things are slightly different each "loop". Kind of like a really lame spot-the-differences meets first person horror adventure.
It's an average concept in general, has been done better than this by other games, and just doesn't pop. But we shouldn't expect too much from student projects.
The graphics aren't great, low poly assets with muddy, poor quality textures. 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.
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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 5 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
This student project/tech demo/glorified homework assignment provides no Steam profile benefits, no +1 to your game count, and little value to gamers (because it's just a small, unpolished student project), so I can't recommend this over the thousands of full, professionally made games on Steam.
