"The Gleam: VR Escape the Room" is a fairly basic Unreal asset flipped first person horror adventure, one of many hundreds, if not thousands of these glutting Steam. The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unreal Marketplace packs, arranged them haphazardly in a Virtual Reality first person adventure game template, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers. The most notable thing about this is the developer abused a loophole with Valve's store system to blank the developer and publisher names to hide their identity. Too bad, Blue Entropy Studios, we know it was you.
Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game is very very short and can be finished in 10 minutes.. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than 2 hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than some free game demos.
The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
The game is completely bug riddled and has design/implementation/stability problems that will render this unplayable for many gamers. The game barely works, the physics are broken, it's an unfinished, unpolished mess that should never have been published in the state it's in. No wonder the developer tried to remove their names from it. But kept it on the store because greed >>> ethics, right?
The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality which fits with the idea they weren't developed by the game creator... they look like they're "just reasonable enough" to go on sale as part of an asset pack. The issue of asset flipping aside, ultimately the quality of these assets is low and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience.
This seems to have been made a VR exclusive to prevent any comparison with non-VR 3D games, a comparison that this game would fail very badly at. Developers must learn that while VR is great, if the only thing that makes the game great is the VR, then the game isn't great at all.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
"The Gleam: VR Escape the Room" has the utterly unrealistic price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
