Warning: Third Party Account

This game requires you to create a third party "Atelier 801" account... there's no valid reason for this in a PC game when SteamWorks is available. This is often done to harvest private data and profile you, with potential sale and transmission of your private data to third parties. The developers will probably argue that you can trust them, but if they were trustworthy they wouldn't demand you create a third party account.

This represents a considerable risk to gamers due to the privacy and security implications of developers that wish to bypass Steam and harvest user data. Remember, sometimes if the product is free, YOU are the product.

Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[en.wikipedia.org]

This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.

"Dead Maze" is a very mediocre 7 year old P2W cash shop infested non-free "MMO" with an anime meets Walking Dead theme, and it's true there's a theme to this all about death, because it's a dead game walking. Crappy 2D web browser tier graphics combined with toxic monetisation in the era of glorious 3D PC MMORPGs sentenced this to death before it could really go anywhere... there's only a handful of people clinging on to their Stockholm Syndrome and sunken cost fallacy playing this.

It's badly designed, mismanaged by the developers, unduly punishing to new and solo players (the old "Join a prison gang to protect you in the shower" mentality is all over this)... it's a train wreck.

The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse.

This game is fairly dated at 7 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.

As mentioned, this isn't really free as the game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this.

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?

Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.

meh