TimeKeeper

⠀

amazing game I like the little quotes at the start

Warning: AI Slop
This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.

"TimeKeeper" is completely pointless garbage... a spin on the "cookie clicker" genre, this one has you shake a tree, collect fruit, rinse and repeat. There's nothing to this and it's hard to even describe this as a game... there's no reason for this to be published on a platform intended for sincerely, genuinely made PC games. It's garbage pollution.

This feels more like a tech demo or a project smacked together hurriedly to try make a kind of minimum viable product just good enough to pass the developers unambitious idea and shove it into Steam Direct to see if you can actually pay $100 and publish junk through Steam Direct. Yeah, you can. Is this good for gamers? Nope.

As mentioned, this features really godawful, "wrong" looking AI slop instead of genuinely and sincerely created game assets. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating real game assets or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks bad because of that decision. AI slop sticks out like a sore thumb... and it comes across as insulting.

There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too, and that's glaringly obvious here.

Now onto pricing and value.

There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $2 USD for this.

Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.

A peak of 2 concurrent players (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.

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?

Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off.

The use of AI slop is a direct insult to gamers and real, ethical content creators and artists everywhere. AI models are trained on copyrighted intellectual property without permission from the owners. Using AI slop in a published product should be seen as supporting these copyright violations.