Dancing with Shadows: Prologue

[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url] This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.[/quote] The "free" section of Steam is being abused for marketing and advertising. "Dancing with Shadows: Prologue" isn't a game, it's an advertisement for the rest of the e-book and you're expected to pay real cash money to unlock the full high school anime club dropout fan-fiction... no thanks. At no point should anyone just trying to find a real, complete PC game on Steam have to deal with an advertisement for a garbage e-book instead. The e-book this is advertising never got finished, it was just a collection of disgusting lazy AI slop prompts combined with a completely cringey high school anime fan club dropout fan-fiction about... you guessed it... the author and his harem of imaginary fantasy anime girlfriends that he made up with AI slop. But that's not completely relevant because the whole book never got done, leaving this unfinished garbage as an advertisement for a product that will never exist (and I think gamers collectively dodged a bullet on that). As an advertisement for a visual novel, this has no notable gameplay. It's just clicking through badly written, cringey fan-fiction tryhard dialogue that wouldn't be accepted in print by any real book publisher. How did such garbage end up on Steam? When failed authors can't get published in print (and possibly laughed at by publishers), they spend $100 to dump their high school fan-fiction e-book onto Steam under the guise of a game... but this time they made the conscious choice to try mislead gamers with this incorrectly published demo. To prove the author of this garbage e-book and corresponding advertisement is abusing the free section of Steam for the purpose of marketing garbage, here's the correct process that [i]the author deliberately did not follow:[/i] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos This e-book works as a Choose Your Own Adventure, but the point stands. Nobody reads a CYOA book and says "What a great game I just played." Books aren't games. This was made using the Ren'Py kit, which lets people who aren't developers create godawfully bad e-books that they then pretend are actually PC games. Just like no real writing talent was involved in this garbage, it's no surprise that no real software development happened here either. Ren'Py is just a shortcut for polluting the store with non-game e-book garbage. Visual novels are tedious at best. Imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or Twilight (kidding), but translate it to a format where you've to click your mouse for every single sentence instead of just turning pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now take that annoying clicking and add utterly cringey high-school anime club dropout writing to it. Real authors are published in print and found on bookshelves. This garbage only ended up on Steam because they paid $100 to self-publish, because let's face it, professional publishers would not only reject this garbage they saw it, they'd take out restraining orders. E-books are just a collection of cringe writing and badly generated character imagery (usually done with a construction kit/image generator). So it might as well be a web page. We don't spend thousands on gaming rigs just to use them for what might as well be reading a website. A peak of 2 concurrent readers for a free visual novel/e-book is a disaster. Out of 130 million potential gamers, almost nobody was interested. That level of rejection speaks for how badly written this is. To put this into perspective, to satisfy the global demand for this book, you'd only ever need to print 2 copies. That's what failure looks like. Advertisements aren't games. This advert for a cringey amateur fan-fiction is just a commercial trying to get your money. It takes up store space that should go to genuine game developers who make real, complete PC games for gamers. You shouldn't support authors who use Steam to dump ads for their badly written fan-fictions.