Visual Novel Sisters

Don't let the troll positive reviews trick you; this is a waste of time and money. Almost took me longer to download the game than it did to actually play it (story only lasts a few minutes + whatever time you spend exploring).

Yes, the exploring aspect is certainly interesting. But there's no point to it! It's an empty map with little relevance to the story at hand. Whatever effort that went into it could've just been used on actual BGs instead. Not to mention the character sprites just being in the way. There are more characters shown on the main menu than are actually present in the game, leading to more depression when they never appear.

And now I'm even more depressed having spent so much effort on this review. Oy vey.

Visual Novel Sisters is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game.

This extremely short e-book is just what Valve calls a "fake game", some badly translated Russian text, a few stolen images... there's literally nothing here of value even to confused e-book fans looking for e-books on a video game store. The fake/paid reviews reveal this for what it really is... a nasty Russian cash grab.

Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage.

Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book.

One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do.

You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games.

Whale Rock Games have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. One example of Whale Rock Games doing this is PolyClassic: Wild, which is really the "POLYGON - Western Pack" asset, written by the actual developers, Synty Studios.

The poor quality of this E-Book is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak reader number was only 17 readers, and the worst part is these weren't genuine readers, these were the Russian fake review accounts that the developer paid to make the fake reviews. Since the fake reviews are all done, now the only reader activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality E-Book is to be expected.

Warning: Review Manipulation!

This E-Book features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian, broken English or ChatGPT AI slop, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the E-Book launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the E-Book, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this E-Book should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.

Due to the 2024 FTC ruling (16 CFR Part 465), these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law.

So, should you buy this E-Book? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?

Visual Novel Sisters has the ridiculous price of $12 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.

For comparison, the $12 asking price for this E-Book could get you games like "Cuphead", "Halo: The Master Chief Collection" or "Phantasmophobia". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this E-Book as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the E-Book (to date). Until this status changes, this E-Book will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this E-Book.

A very short visual novel without a lot of different sprites and choices made it is very simple. I hope the author of the game will gain experience and make games in the future