"TV Trouble" is a weird little animal. It's basically a set of small and trite minigames, simple puzzles, which you solve in order to "repair" TV's stylised to look like TV's from the 1960s (they don't resemble TVs from the 1960s). There's a little bit of 1960's archival/public domain TV clips playing on the TVs, and the clips are much, much more interesting than the actual game. And you can watch 1960's clips on Youtube, so that kind of invalidates the entire game, doesn't it?
The graphics aren't great, kinda simple, inauthentic looking designs, low poly stuff that might even be geared towards mobile apps rather than a PC game. 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.
This game is fairly dated at 9 years old... it's showing a bit of age and won't give you a very up-to-date gaming experience.
On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 11 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.
