The Stairway

"The Stairway" is an exercise in just how ugly the filters on a minimum effort Unity kitbash can get. And the answer is, pretty bad. But yes, I'm afraid to say the sole point of interest in this amateur shovelware is the ugly "pencil drawing" filters slathered all over stock/placeholder Unity assets and not much else going on. What do you do in the game? It's a 3D platformer, and a bad one. You can do some rather poorly done 3D platforming here on the minimalist environments, but really the focus is just on the graphics filter. Boggles the mind that anyone would think something like this should go on the same platform as GTA:V, Baldur's Gate 3 and Death Stranding, but here we are. The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?" While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't. 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. Now onto pricing and value. 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. Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 4 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this. This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download? Give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.