Interesting take, but I have never not wanted to try out a game engine until I saw this article's screenshots. Like, since I was a literal child in middle school I've always loved tinkering on new projects in an unknown game engine: I remember writing code in the most truly random environments ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenix_Project ) because I was more enamored with tinkering on demos in different game engines…
Interesting take on the take ! May I ask how old you are ? Those screenshot are not fancy indeed, I do recognize that. But middle school me would have been really excited if a website told him that he was about to program something like that. I do find the grey theme sad and kinda kitch, too. But not the underlying promesses.
The worst part is, they could look modern simply changing some colors. If the characters were bright red, it would look like the very-modern game “SuperHot”