"Goblin Gearshop" is another restaurant/business crafting/selling game, like Schedule 1 only with goblins making weapons and stuff. Fine I guess, the implementation is hardly going to win any awards. At best I can describe this as very average... and in this case it's not meant in a derogatory way. There's thousands of games on Steam way worse than this, and many of them paid. This just doesn't "spark joy".

The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. Simple textures, low quality, almost mobile-esque cartoony graphics... it's not inspiring anyone. 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.

It's not very long, there's not that many recipes or things to do... in some ways this feels more like an advert/demo for a bigger game that never eventuated.

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 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.