"Trikaya" is a student project self-published on Steam Direct. It's from SMU Guildhall in the USA. This is the result of an academic exercise for students. It's not a full, complete game in the way professionally developed products are. While it has more quality than most amateur games, it's 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 a simple first person puzzle game where you get three of the four cardinal elements (what do you guys have against Water, huh???) and use them as various "puzzle guns" to solve fire, earth and air related puzzles (which are few because this is just a student demo and not a real, full game).
The graphics aren't great, low poly untextured environments. 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.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
This game is fairly dated at 5 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has 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 just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free, that was a dismal public reception. But if you take into account the problems I bring up in this review, it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
This isn't a complete game for gamers, just a glorified homework assignment, and there's no profile benefits like a +1 count to your game collector badge, so I can't recommend adding it to your library.
At the end of the day, my reviews are intended to help gamers find quality and avoid the dregs (with over 140,000 games on Steam... not all of them are masterpieces). If you think my review is wrong, definitely add this to your library, download it and play it... it's surely exactly the kind of game you'll love (but I doubt it will work out that way). Game reviews are for gamers to share their thoughts and help others choose where to spend valuable time. If my review helps you to grab or reject this game, then my job is done.
