Some launches are rough. Some are catastrophic. And then there’s SurrounDead Poly Construction, which dropped on Steam today already discounted 40% and immediately faceplanted into “Mostly Negative” territory.

Developer LivingEveryday priced their open-world survival adventure game at $3.59 — down from $5.99 — right out of the gate. Didn’t matter. Of the 43 players who’ve weighed in as of publication, only 35% left a positive review. The math is brutal: 15 thumbs up, 28 thumbs down.

The review excerpts tell you everything. One player who logged 7.2 hours praised the crafting system and tech tree before discovering that magic weapons rendered the entire progression pointless, calling them “so crazy op lol.” Another positive review, at 13.4 hours played, consists entirely of a single blank character. Inspiring.

Then there’s the player who spent exactly 0.1 hours — roughly six minutes of actual gameplay — before typing six words: “I want my 9 minutes back!”

Nine concurrent players are in the game right now. Nine. It charted on Steam’s New Releases list anyway, which says more about the bar for that metric than it does about the game.

This isn’t even the first rodeo. According to MSN, Steam previously gave SurrounDead Poly Construction away for free in April, with a DLC bundle going for $28.05. Some early players couldn’t get the game to launch at all — one fix involved renaming the executable file. A reviewer quipped that getting it running was itself a puzzle, rating it “11/10” for nostalgia value.

Launching at a discount signals one of two things: generosity or desperation. When the reviews stack up this fast and this badly, it’s not generosity. The game remains available on Steam for anyone who wants to spend $3.59 finding out why 28 people wish they hadn’t.

Sources