Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort top-down console reject shooters, and "Trouble Inn: Jonny's Room" 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.
Now in fairness the developer put a lot of effort into designing puzzles and writing really cringey VN dialogue into a point-and-click aim shooter... this is lipstick on a dead pig, all of this effort is completely wasted when the technical implementation and visuals are so bad they would be panned by critics in the 1990s, and this was published in 2021, so there's no excuses. This abysmal technical quality was the direct cause of this failing.
The top-down shooter genre is pretty much obsolete, even console peasants don't bother with them anymore. Just a tiny number of top-down shooters went anywhere on PC despite the little value they offer (Enter the Gungeon, etc). This is nowhere near being as good as those. Even without a price tag, it's easy to see why gamers ignored this in favor of modern, professionally developed 3D games. This is offering nothing new or interesting.
This game fails on the visuals because of the use of incredibly lazy, ugly pixelcrap. The developer would probably argue this is a "deliberate artistic choice" but we all know it's because the developer was incapable of producing anything better. The game looks very poor compared to professionally developed games. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant, this looks bad because of that developer decision. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's a disservice to gamers when developers don't bother doing their jobs and creating contemporary, high quality visuals. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are rare exceptions that succeeded [i]in spite[/i] of their awful graphics. Pixelcrap is never really okay, and there's no excuse for games that look this bad.
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 look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers 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.
A peak of [b]2 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
No way. This is just impossible to recommend to serious PC gamers. I didn't spend any money on this, but I still feel like I got scammed.
