The top Steam review for Hex Strikers doesn’t gush about the art direction or the soundtrack. It says: “It doesn’t make sense that it’s free.”

That’s either the best endorsement a game can get or a flashing yellow light. Maybe both.

Hex Strikers, released April 30 by Brisbane-based Sid Fish Games and collaborator Foster Turtle, takes the funfair High Striker — you know, the carnival game where you slam a mallet and try to ring the bell — and turns it into a roguelike deckbuilder. You place hex tiles, trigger Strikers, build synergies, and chase the highest score possible from your allotted strikes. Think incremental-game dopamine meets strategic tile placement.

The pitch is genuinely clever. The High Striker is pure raw-number spectacle, which maps cleanly onto the score-chasing loop that makes deckbuilders crack-like. One reviewer with 6.3 hours played called it “an absolute blast” and praised the “addicting score chasing” and the thrill of “seeing numbers climbing higher exponentially.” They also disclosed helping with playtesting, so grain of salt on that one.

The other reviewer, at under an hour, was already hooked enough to question the business model.

Here’s the thing: the game is free. No microtransactions listed, no battle pass, no premium currency on the store page. Just free. For a genre where $15–$25 is standard, that raises eyebrows. Is Sid Fish Games being generous, or is this a soft launch — build a player base, gather feedback, then slap on a price tag once the kinks are worked out? Five concurrent players at launch suggests the audience is still finding it, which would make early adopter feedback critical.

Sid Fish Games’ other titles — Putty Putter, Space Filler, Escape Sequence — are small-scope puzzle and strategy games. Hex Strikers fits the pattern: tight mechanical focus, modest scale. The free-to-play tag may simply reflect that reality. Not every indie release needs to justify its price point.

But when your own players are telling strangers the game is too good to be free, you’ve either got a marketing problem or a pricing opportunity. Five concurrent players means the verdict is still out on which.

Sources