Old Tunnel

Old Tunnel is a linear roguelike in an adorable pixel graphic style.

• It features a peculiar game mechanic: Depending on whether you're facing traps or enemies at the moment, controls change function. i.e. the same key does a different task.
  
  When hurdling traps:
  A = jump 
  S = dodge
  D = bash with shield
  
  When battling enemies:
  A = shoot (and reload when your clip is empty)
  S = shield 
  D = health item
  F = use knife
  G = throw explosive
• This is taken a step further because with certain enemies, tasks are shuffled on the fly mid battle for a few seconds.
  So for example, A will be for throwing a knife instead of shooting, D will be for shooting instead of using a health item, and so on.
• You're always auto-moving towards your right, maneuvering through traps and clearing monsters as you go.
• No mouse is required. You hit keys on your keyboard corresponding to the actions you need to take.
• There's a shop for weapons and items; and a weapon's bench for upgrading and switching weapons.

What I liked:

1. This fresh and simple take on roguelikes. It's a nice change.
2. Cute visual style + nice music.
3. Using the kb only. This brings back fond memories of older games!
4. It's a comfort game of sorts. No stress whatsoever. First off, it's easy. You can complete it on Normal difficulty in a few hours (except for that darn last boss ugh). Also, when you die, you respawn at the same area with your last weapon and all your coins intact; as opposed to starting from scratch.

Things I'd like added:

1. The ability to redefine controls.
   I'd like to tweak them to a setting more comfortable for both hands on the keyboard as opposed to using my left only.
2. The ingame objectives (called Quests) are a nice touch but they need to appear onscreen as a popup when completed. What we get instead is a popup that says Quest Completed. Read more in Pause. Pausing the game to do this breaks the fluidity of your run.
3. The quests also don't seem to serve a function other than perhaps familiarizing the player with the basic mechanics. It would be much better if they served an actual purpose.
4. This is nitpicking but a certain something (no spoilers!) doesn't seem to be affected by the same traps that kill you. Maybe adding a maneuvering animation for that something would make for a more realistic look and help with immersion.
5. Create a mechanic to deal with the coins we get. I have over 7,000 coins and already bought everything the shop has to offer, including new weapons and fully upgrading them. I'd show you a screenshot but .. read further down.

Cons:

1. The Settings are accessible only from the start Menu. If you want to change a setting during your run, you need to quit to the main Menu to do so. This needs to be fixed.
2. The game remains fair on Normal till the final boss (area 5) when the shifting keys mechanic becomes erratic rather than following a rhythm, changing at the moment you need to press the 'already new' shield key only to find it has shifted again at the last possible second leaving you pressing on shoot instead :/ This becomes increasingly irritating especially that you face this final boss only after clearing the entirety of area 5 first.
3. Ingame screenshots are disabled somehow. It seems to not work for some reason. I tried changing the shortcut to a different key but it still didn't work. It works fine in my other games.
   I even checked the Screenshots in the Community section. There are none.  https://steamcommunity.com/app/2075370/screenshots/?p=1&browsefilter=toprated
4. Some of the achievements require you to run xxx meters. I don't believe these are counted correctly for the Long Distance and Marathon Distance ones (Run 1,000 and 2,500 meters, respectively).
   To put things in perspective, the Average distance achievement (Run 500 meters) unlocked for me in less than 2 hours of game time and before reaching area 3.
   Now after 5 hours I'm in area 5 for the 6th run but the 1,000 meters achievement remains locked. https://steamcommunity.com/id/VolcanicPM/stats/2075370/achievements/

Conclusion:
I wish there was a Neutral choice when it comes to recommendations.
As much as the game is fun and introduces a fresh take on an established genre, I couldn't in good conscience recommend it in the state it's in at the moment.

Feel free to try it with the stipulation that the game remains within the <$3 bracket, knowing that this is still a work in progress, lacks final polish and is quite a short game.
Better yet, get it on sale.

I would be happy to change this to a Thumbs Up! once the issues I raised are fixed because they're imho quite serious.

Stylish pixel art runner in which we have to break through underground tunnels, dodging various traps and fighting unusual enemies, including serious bosses. The trick of the game is that you need to press the keyboard keys in time to successfully overcome obstacles and correctly use the tactics of battles with monsters.
Pleasant visual style and cool music will create an atmosphere of unforgettable console games.

Old Tunnel is more Russian GameMaker Studio copy+paste overpriced cash grab shovelware from the Russian developers at HugePixel, doing what they can to pollute Steam and lower the average quality of all games everywhere. Here we have a hybrid endless runner and QTE game where you run along a tunnel endlessly and must jump over or duck under obstacles as you run. From time to time you'll stop and fight a monster and must use one of 5 abilities (all on cooldowns) to kill the monster or defend yourself... that's all there is to it, the shallowness of the game is matched only by the very low quality of the technical implementation.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.

While there's options to change the resolution for the game, this just scales the fixed resolution pixel assets. There's no way to customise the graphics settings or improve the low quality visuals.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.

A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", HugePixel has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

Warning: Review Manipulation!

This game features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.

Old Tunnel has the completely unrealistic cash grab price of around $8 USD (for pixelcrap copy + pasted out of GameMaker Studio), it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.

Profile Features Limited!

Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.