Beyond the Marion

A short, fun experience, enjoyed the characters a lot!

"Beyond the Marion" is a promising enough premise, delivered badly. This is a first person adventure game with a plodding pace. I liked the way the game puts you in a 1970's aesthetic space ship adventure. I didn't like the way it's a bug riddled mess that barely works, has a weak plot and an even weaker core gameplay design. Plodding around and then running into puzzle minigames that don't work due to blatantly untested bugs is a fantastic way to take a great premise and ruin it just as fast as the $100 they wasted on Steam Direct for this mess. Despite not being in Early Access, it's obvious this is an incomplete product. Developers have an obligation to deliver complete, not partially done products to gamers, that shouldn't be controversial. Whatever the excuses may be, it does no service to gamers for incomplete products polluting Steam like this. It makes it harder for gamers to find complete games, and it makes it harder for ethical developers who do the right thing to find their audience. The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 3 concurrent players[/b]... 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? What's the verdict? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.

☀️

Neat, swaggy aesthetics, quite short, mostly leaves me with a wonder of whether there will be more games to expand on the universe (and the universen't) this takes place in; Despite its brevity the lore is still pretty intriguing.

This game was awful. I dipped after having everything reset after the third attempt at fixing the generator with the awful timing system that kills you.

i really liked it! the only issues i had at all was really just that it was really fetchquest-y and a couple times it ended up messing up my cycles, which i only ended up having 5 (i think?) but it was not overly annoying to me. i really liked the idea that when you fail a cycle you learn how to do better in the next one.