Nux is an enigma to me. Everything about it screams post-Greenlight Steam shovelware, from the implementation of Steam trading cards, backgrounds, and other garbage that’s worth more than the game itself to the just generally awful quality of everything from sound to visuals to performance, but the store page tells me it came out in 2006. I can find next to nothing about this game online, other than dodgy key-sellers and suggested searches for ‘embarrassing Steam games’ and ‘worst free games’, and the publisher seems to have exclusively released bottom of the barrel Steam trash.
I get that people have tried to sell garbage since long before Steam, but in its own way Nux is refreshing because it’s garbage from another time. It’s trash from a time before the proliferation of an entire Age of Trash, and for that I give Nux credit. It does feel like it’s just bad because of laziness and incompetence, not because of a concerted effort on the part of its developer to just scrape up some cash from trading cards. Some effort has definitely gone into this; it’s got multiple gameplay styles like how a lot of SNES games used to try and stand out, and claymation isn’t the easiest art style to pull off and while they haven’t pulled it off, that they’ve tried puts them a step above the rest of the Steam crowd.
Unfortunately, a step above the absolute bottom of the barrel is still pretty bad, and Nux isn’t anywhere approaching what I’d call ‘fun’ or even really ‘playable’. In a world where games are judged against the worst possible way they could have been then sure, Nux would be a huge success, but for now we’re just barely not living in that world, and in the meantime I would recommend that you avoid playing this game.
Dylan's Morsels 