legitimately one of my favorite games of all time and i cannot for the life of me explain why.

This game will be depicted as art (and maybe rightfully so) because it was included in a Jacob Geller video, but there's very little to experience here that would not be re-created by googling brutalist architecture. It's a frankly boring, non-game "experience", that is 0 reason to play. It's not bad, just, pointless?

"BABBDI" is a bit of a weird mess of a game, low quality visuals meet a premise that might work if it wasn't for the rather vapid technical delivery. You're stuck in some eastern bloc brutalist architecture nightmare and you have to explore and escape. The game gives the player a reasonable arsenal of tools and things to experiment with, making this feel a bit like a sandbox in some ways, but you do have a clear goal. It would have been nice if the delivery matched the premise, but it doesn't.

There's a huge amount of room for improvement here, but I can understand why gamers enjoyed the premise of an open world platformer, but for me the technicals just aren't there that I could call this one of the best of the 120,000+ games on Steam. It isn't.

The graphics aren't great, clunky, low poly count game assets (that seem legit because what asset creator with a working mind would create a piano asset with only 7 keys). That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.

On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes 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, or something you might want to spend your time on.

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.