"Dawn" is a somewhat low poly 3D platformer from the SMU Guildhall and it looks like this year the students passed the course. Unfortunately the game itself is probably too short to recommend... it has to be worth the time taken to download it.

What do you do in the game? This is a basic third person platformer with a couple of gimmicks around plant growth and fairies, which might be entertaining for kids. Unfortunately even student projects, when published on Steam, need to be reviewed as a product for gamers, and not an assessment of how well the students understood the course.

The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.

Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.

Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable.

Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.

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?

This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.