"When The Past Was Around - Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "When The Past Was Around". When The Past Was Around is effectively a browser/Flash game that's somehow on Steam instead of, you know, Chrome or Firefox. And as always, if it can be done by a web browser, it doesn't belong in your library. The product this is advertising is a simple and trite point and click puzzle game about the developers relationship problems or something... look, it's a bad game and not worth anyone's time.

But this isn't completely relevant because this is not When The Past Was Around, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "When The Past Was Around - Prologue" too.

The purpose of this advertisement is to get you to shell out a whopping $8 USD on buying When The Past Was Around, and I don't recommend you do that either.

But on top of that the developer is also asking for a ten dollar donation!!!. That's right... he wants you to give him TEN BUCKS because he polluted Steam with an advert/demo and directly avoided following the correct process. For profit. This is not okay... it's apalling disrespect for Steam and for gamers. But it makes one thing clear... this guy cares about nothing but getting your money any way he can.

So this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time.

It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos

While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace.

It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers.

Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 14 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.

Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.