DummyDoodle

It's free, and it's got controls. Settles it for me.

"DummyDoodle" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This is an incredibly barebones platformer with almost no animation, gameplay that's worse than the visuals (we'll get into those, it's remarkable how bad they are)... I'm really confounded by this one. Was it a joke? Or did the developer genuinely think this was something worth publishing? Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything tr…