"The Manor" is an unusual amateur project where you excorcize demons using a special custom spellcasting system and plod through a attemptedly humourous linear narrative. All of which might work well if the production values were remotely contemporary, but this comes across like a 2D top down Flash game from the 1990's. This was published about 6 weeks ago on the same platform as Black Myth Wukong and Marvel Rivals. We'll go over just how amazingly successful this was a bit later.
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.
In terms of visuals, this features really godawful 2D MS-Paint tier "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. The deplorably bad visuals here come across as an insult to gamers.
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.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak user count was only ONE person. That's right, only one person ever used this at a time. When I tried this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak user count for the product. OUCH.
The only user activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it.
Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality product is to be expected.
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?
Pass on this one. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.
