"Out of Line" is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. In fairness, this Nintendo Switch ported handheld platformer is far from the worst on Steam, and doesn't even feature terrible pixel "art", there's no prizes for being fairly tall for a midget.

This puzzle platformer features some handcrafted art and has puzzles that revolve around simplistic physics and other activities, as well as a somewhat whimsical story. Such a concept might work if presented with extremely high quality 3D visuals and gameplay, but this is a Nintendo Switch game here on Steam.

One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The 2D artwork here is middling at best, a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets, and isn't of sufficient quality to make up for the other defects in the game.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

"Out of Line" has the greedy, cash grab price of around $8 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $8 asking price for this game could get you games like "Fallout: New Vegas", "Borderlands 2" or "Warhammer: Vermintide 2". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.