Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort top-down console reject shooters, and "The Neurochemical Conjob" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 6,000 of these on Steam, and almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes. This is not one of the good ones.
This is a simplistic and pointless single screen arena shooter where you control some "Agent" and shoot your negative emotions. I don't understand what this has to do with confidence scams... heck, this barely has anything to do with gaming, it really is junk.
This is a tired, outdated experience from a tired, outdated and obsolete game genre. Just a couple of top-down shooters out of literally thousands have any appeal for gamers lately (Hotline Miami, etc), and I'd argue against those having much value for gamers. This is so much worse. This "me too" Steam Direct shooter in a crowded genre offers nothing new. It's "free", but [i]free[/i] doesn't mean [i]good.[/i]
This feels more like a tech demo or a project smacked together hurriedly to try make a kind of minimum viable product just good enough to pass the developers unambitious idea and shove it into Steam Direct to see if you can actually pay $100 and publish junk through Steam Direct. Yeah, you can. Is this good for gamers? Nope.
The graphics here are particularly awful, lazy 2D retro-ish sprites that probably took less than half an hour to make, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment.
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.
Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. 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.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 2 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
This is a hard pass. 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.
