“Developer Claims Puzzle Game’s Steam Struggles Stem from Younger Players’ Lack of Email Skills”

Indie developer Petter Malmehed launched his unique alternate reality puzzle game, After Hours, in 2018. While he considers it a decent effort, it didn’t achieve major commercial success. Recently, however, he’s noticed a troubling trend: user reviews on Steam have been steadily declining, and completion rates are dropping. He believes he has pinpointed the cause.

The culprit? Email. And a younger audience that seems to struggle with it. For those of you who are older Gen-Z or beyond, this might be puzzling. What’s so complicated about email? You compose a message, add a brief subject line, and then fill in the body, finishing with a sign-off like “best regards” before your signature. If the idea of a ‘subject line’ has you scratching your head, you’re supporting Malmehed’s theory.

In a Reddit post and discussions with an outlet, Malmehed shared that in 2024, he began to see After Hours’ reviews drop significantly, leaving him puzzled. He received feedback that the game was “too hard,” and completion rates were falling, prompting him to investigate. He discovered that an NPC named Sarah, who requires players to send real-life emails to progress the story, held the key to the issue.

Upon checking Sarah’s email inbox, Malmehed found thousands of emails from 2025 alone. Alarmingly, he noticed that “about a third of them” contained no content in the body; everything was crammed into the subject line, which hindered the in-game system from recognizing the necessary keywords for responses.

“That’s something I’ve noticed a lot of young people are doing these days,” he remarked. “So I believe the users are in general pretty young.”

While it’s tough to pinpoint the exact factors affecting a game’s performance—especially one with only 57 total Steam reviews—Malmehed is taking responsibility and developing tools to improve communication about how the game functions.

“No form of modern communication requires a subject and a body — it’s easy to see how people unfamiliar with email aren’t filling out both fields.”

Looking at Malmehed’s more recent projects, it’s clear he’s wise to acknowledge some responsibility here. His 2025 puzzle game, Palm Cracker, unfolds on the screen of a stolen PalmPilot, a device so outdated that even I, in my mid-30s, almost forgot about it. Ironically, this game boasts the highest Steam reviews of Malmehed’s work, currently holding a “very positive” rating. Perhaps the secret lies in tapping into millennial nostalgia—maybe a Tamagotchi game is next on the horizon.