Wild Angels | Episode 1

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"Wild Angels | Episode 1" is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game... except it's not a full e-book either! This just like the first chapter in some godawful fan-fiction and the "author" expects you'll go pay money or something to get the rest of it. This is never okay.

As an advertisement for 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 godawfully badly written advertisement for an e-book that never got written at least isn't about the authors imaginary girlfriend (most e-books are about this topic, cringey). Instead it's a (hopefully not autobiographical) fan-fiction about criminals.

This e-book isn't that linear and works more as a Choose Your Own Adventure, but the point still stands... nobody read a CYOA book and then said "Wow, what a great game I just played." Books aren't games.

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.

Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 3 concurrent readers... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. The funny thing is, if you wanted to print this book, you'd only need to print 3 copies to satisfy the entire world's demand for it.

This isn't a game and it's not even a complete book, it's just a badly made advertisement for a fan-fiction. E-books aren't games, and neither are advertisements. You deserve better than being advertised to. These advertisments are harmful because they're taking up marketing and space that should more correctly given to real, genuine game developers who do the right thing and make real games for gamers.