Warning: AI Slop
This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.
This is a somewhat genuine attempt to make a game with AI Slop. The game itself is portrayed as a "plague doctor" simulator, but really it plays like one of those RNG-run kingdom simulators/Oregon Trail... you're presented with random events and prompted with a multiple choice answer about what you'll do about it as a plague doctor in charge of deciding what people do when there's a plague. The writing is tongue in cheek and somewhat satirical, but like all VN heavy amateur games on Steam Direct, fairly bad and a little cringey.
So basically you make RNG choices and see what the outcomes are and click through various "seasons" until the end. And just like Oregon Trail, this can result in everyone dying of a horrible, mistreated disease.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The art itself is all AI slop... generated using models that were trained, without permission, on copyrighted works that neither the AI service or the developer had permission to use. This is copyright infringement, while not directly done, the developer absolutely knew how those models are trained and unethically decided to try to use them in a paid product... trying to get YOUR money for copyright infringing AI slop. This is totally unacceptable.
The controls can't be customised because the game doesn't really have any interface beyond menus and simple UI controls no different from dialog boxes in Windows Explorer. If you think about it, this barely counts as an "interactive" game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play fully immersive games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game.
The poor quality of this game 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 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player 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 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
It's hard to describe this as a game, the focus is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming rig is not a kindle.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it among the best the Steam catalogue has to offer?
The Book of Plagues has the gamer gouging price of around $7 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $7 asking price for this game could get you games like "Dead by Daylight", "Final Fantasy XIV Online" or "Yakuza Kiwami". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. Charging money for AI slop is reprehensible and unethical.
Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game 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 game.
