Searching for the term "top-down shooter" on Steam gives you thousands of results... there's thousands and thousands of garbage tier shooters infesting Steam. "The Viewer's Game" fits right into that category of retro shovelware glutting the Steam store. Only a tiny number of those are any good, and this isn't one of them.
This is a garbage experimental game developed by crowdsourcing the game design goals... this is a terrible idea and resulted in one of the worst games on Steam. This was a complete failure on Steam Direct.
The result was one of the worst top down shooters ever made, that's all there is to the gameplay with a singular gimmick around your "class" that doesn't really influence the game in any significant way. What a waste of time.
This is a tired, outdated experience from a tired, outdated and obsolete game genre.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]
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 here are particularly awful, lazy phoned in garbage beneath the quality of MS-Paint, 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.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
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 5 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.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Definitely not. This isn't worth it. I'm paraphrasing another reviewer here, but this should be a paid product... they'd have to pay people to download it.
