"1931: Scheherazade at the Library of Pergamum" is not a game, it's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure/Fighting Fantasy style e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. The vast majority of this E-book is 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?".
To answer that question: 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.
Some effort went into trying to extend the completely crap Ren'Py construction kit visual novel with an RPG system here, slapped together with Pygame. And guess what... there may be nothing at all in the world worse for gamers than the craptastic Ren'Py non-game making construction kit, but if there is, it's Pygame. I've reviewed over 11,000 games on Steam now, and I can say with utmost certainty it's even worse than RPG Maker and GameGuru. It really is trash... and perhaps that's unfair, but I've simply never seen anyone do anything decent with it. Philosophical questions on who to blame (bad developers or bad tools) can be put aside here anyway, the point is, as far as gamers are concerned, is that this is garbage and you shouldn't buy it.
So they went and added stats to the e-book, but this only made the experience worse as you now have to "grind" the book to get more stats so you can read new parts of the book... ugh. What complete garbage. Imagine reading a book and then finding chapter 2 is padlocked and if you want to read it, you have to go read chapter 1 a few more times first. That's exactly the kind of experience you should expect from this garbage choose-your-own-adventure. It's beyond awful. And that's just one of so many reasons this was overwhemlingly rejected by the 120M+ gamers on Steam.
Let's go into all the defects on this barely-a-game E-book.
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.
This particular E-Book/CYOA does have some "stats", numbers added to create the illusion of gameplay, but these numbers are less meaningful than the stats in an old Fighting Fantasy novel, and have little bearing on the various E-book endings this visual novel provides. Nobody finished reading a Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because books aren't games. And this is hardly any different, RPG stats aside, no matter how clumsily they were tacked on.
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.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The E-Book features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this E-Book does.
"1931: Scheherazade at the Library of Pergamum" didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the E-Book, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the rather poorly done "tutorial", trivial to get, but less than 15 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the E-Book. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the E-Book.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this E-Book was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the E-Book. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 15 percent of players bothered playing the E-Book for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this E-Book to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this E-Book? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this E-Book for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the E-Book just has a couple of players every week running up the E-Book and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many E-Books like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
"1931: Scheherazade at the Library of Pergamum" is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. If you want to read a book, Project Gutenberg has over 70,000 professionally written books. All completely free. There's just no reason anyone should spend money on this garbage.
