Puzzle Garden is a student project from DigiPen. One of the first things students should be taught in game development is that 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's with dedicated 3D cards like the Voodoo3 and the ATI Rage. But the students were deliberately mistaught that's it's okay to release obsolete 2D games in the 3D era of gaming... and certainly and professional developer seeing a prospective new hire who doesn't even know about 3D gaming probably isn't going to give them a job.

Needless to say if an educational institution taught me incorrectly on purpose, I'd ask for my money back.

This is a simple 2D isometric browser game (effectively)... it's a super lightweight ripoff of Farmville without the monetisation. A casual puzzle simulation game set on a virtual farm, lacking a distinct story. The player engages in planting crops with different financial returns across different land layouts. Gameplay centers on optimizing these layouts and abilities to maximize profit within each puzzle level.

We also have to question what value there is for gamers on Steam when institutions flood the store with low quality 2D video game homework assignments... sure, it might make the students feel good about themselves, but this has no benefit for gamers who have to wade through this stuff to find professionally made 3D games.

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.

Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.

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?

Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.