"Hellpoint: The Thespian Feast" is is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Hellpoint". Hellpoint is a rather mediocre "soulslike" sci-fi RPG-lite/action game that reached middling success, from the toxic Steam abusers at tinyBuild, who made a huge name for themselves by putting Early Access/alpha tests on Steam for their products, to get free testing, then yanking those products from Steam and making them EGS exclusive... and taking a hefty bribe from Tencent/Epic regardless of the sheer harm that corrupt and anticompetitive behavior does to the industry. But that's a side point, I just include it because understandably gamers will want nothing to do with products from toxic, consumer hostile developers like tinyBuild.
Back to Hellpoint... or not, because this is not Hellpoint, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Hellpoint: The Thespian Feast" too.
The purpose of this advertisement is to get you to shell out an eye watering, completely insane $35 USD on buying Hellpoint, and I don't recommend you do that either.
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.
As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time.
It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos
While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace.
It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.
