Axiom Alternative II 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 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 Ren'Py 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 disastrous train wreck is possibly bringing us close to the rock bottom of pollution that infests Steam. Not only is this not a game, it's not even a bad fan-fiction E-book.. it's fan-fiction [i]FOR[/i] another fan-fiction E-book. It's a sloppy, craptastic reinvention of the Chichester series of literary dribble that's been polluting Steam and worsening crapware Daily Indie Game bundles for years. And, surprises to nobody, it's even worse than a Chichester E-book. I never imagined such a thing could be possible, but this is pure, ultra refined garbage.
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 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.
Don't take my word for just how bad this is, either. Facts don't lie... SteamDB shows this crap E-book was so widely rejected by gamers that it only ever had 1 concurrent reader. At no point in time has this E-book been read by more than one person at a time. What a complete joke.
[quote]Online Stalking and Harassment[/quote]
The developer has started stalking me, delivering personal attacks and is attempting to publicly cyberbully and intimidate me by posting hit-piece videos and articles. Why? Because I wrote an honest and frank assessment about an objectively bad and failed product. It's an objective failure rejected by gamers, for the reasons I supplied in my accurate review.
Certainly, the hit-pieces the stalker/developer has linked up in response to some of my reviews are false and misleading, but cyberbullies don't care about facts, they just want to intimidate and silence the truth. This behaviour from the developer is utterly unacceptable, and is a chilling attempt to intimidate and stifle reviewers.
Now, you can look at the objective facts of my review, and then have a look at how this reviewer is attacking and intimidating reviewers, and suddenly the overwhelming rejection of his craptastic Ren'Py asset flips makes a lot more sense.
I will not be intimidated or silenced by stalkers and bullies.
