Note: This E-Book should not be confused with the 2016 console game of the same name from Benjamin Rivers/BancyCo. This E-book is a Ren'Py construction kit flip that seems to have been named intentionally to confuse gamers into buying a crap Russian E-book.
Alone With You 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 e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. Although some mention may be made of the Russian (wait I thought this e-book was Japanese themed, are they lying to us?) voice acting and the use of Live2D to make this E-book more animated (but still not a game).
This e-book/Russian audio book is very badly written with even worse translation. The only vague point of interest is the unattributed and uncredited use of Ren'Py's Live2D feature to add some animations to the E-book. Yeah... not impressing anyone.
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.
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.
The poor quality of this Russian E-Book is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 readers. This is a remarkably low number, and 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 50,000 real, non E-book games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality E-Book is to be expected.
Alone With You is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the Russian E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
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 Russian E-Book.
