1Second is one of those pretentious "art" games, not really a game at all, most likely put on Steam Direct as a cash grab/joke (and the lack of sincerity here shows by the way the game is priced and was rushed into cheap nasty game bundles at launch). And lack of sincerity is a huge problem. Amateur developers already have a bad name, and this kind of pretentious crap really does not help at all.
Let me explain why this is such utter garbage.
This "art" crap is not really a game, like I mentioned. All you do is get a black screen with a text instruction and a 1 second cooldown. The instruction will be something like "press A" or "don't press anything". Failing to meet the instruction requirements within 1 second ends your game and you have to start again (or just uninstall). Pathetic, isn't it?
So this crap comes across as a question to see whether people will spend money on garbage or not; at best, this was an attempt from a pretentious non-developer to try "go viral" and get rich quick from pumping minimalist garbage onto Steam through Steam Direct... but again, like I said, this kind of garbage just pollutes Steam and it makes things even worse for amateur developers.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game interface is just text, it's at best the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/HTML games from the 1990s. While that might be fine for the 1990s, gaming has evolved a lot since then, the ATI Rage became mainstream in 1996... it's 2025, and that kind of thing just won't fly anymore, it's just not visually up to scratch.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
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 2 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 130,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 130,000+ games on Steam?
1Second is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
Note: Because this is more of a "joke" game, intended to draw attention from controversy or in the hopes of going viral because it's "so bad it's good" (but it isn't good at all), there's nothing here to offer to serious gamers. As usual, with most awful/joke games, all the comedians come out of the woodwork. The vast majority of the reviews for this game are joke reviews, such as "this game cured my cancer, saved my marriage, changed my life" etc. Because most of the reviews are as insincere as the game itself is, and if you removed the fake/joke reviews the game would have a markedly different review score, the positive review score for this game should be disregarded.
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.
