"-256" is a short, unambitious and pointless narrative driven adventure game where you're in a hotel that looks awful, and you do some walking around, expose the narrative, with lite puzzle work. Well, I say lite, it's more obtuse and annoying.. a little tutorial work never went astray.

The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 20 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download.

The graphics here are particularly awful, low poly assets of deplorably low quality with pixelcrap textures all over them, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment.

It's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise.

Now onto pricing and value.

This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.

You can always judge a game by how popular it is with the general public. Steam has over 130 million unique gamers, and over 40 million unique logons every day from dedicated PC gamers. But this only ever had a peak player count of a dozen or so people... that's very poor public reception. Gamers rejected this, most likely due to the reasons I supply in this review.

Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?

Nope, even if you don't have to pay any money up front, this isn't something I can suggest PC gamers spend their time on... there's thousands of better games on Steam.

Short and sweet. -256 has an intriguing story and a refreshing art style to keep you engaged. The simple gameplay is overshadowed by the overall theme and tone. I think the only part that bothered me was the "puzzle" section. I found myself "stumbling" around instead of finding the patterns i was looking for (trying to avoid spoilers).

Overall, definitely recommend, though don't feel bad about needing a guide (though try not to spoil it for yourself!)