Dissent

wait, thats not a demo?

"Dissent" isn't a game, it's a cringey non-game high school anime club dropout fan-fiction that's been dumped on Steam into the games section. As a visual novel, it doesn't have any gameplay. It's just a lot of clicking through bad, cringe dialogue that no real publisher would ever accept. When people can't get their work published in print, they pay the $100 fee to dump their fan-fiction here instead, where we have to put up with it when looking for things that are actual PC games. While this garbage e-book features all the same high school anime club dropout fan-fiction writing, it's not really a full book, intended to be an advertisement/prologue/demo for some other garbage e-book also unwanted by gamers. The plot, refreshingly, is not apparently all about the author and his imaginary girlfriend, as are most Steam Direct non-game e-book fan-fictions, instead, this follows a college student investigating a mysterious research labratory, only with bad writing. This is a Choose Your Own Adventure format, but that doesn't make it a game. It's still just a book. Nobody finishes the pain of reading a cringey CYOA fan-fiction and thinks it was a video game. This was slapped together with the godawful Ren'Py visual novel construction kit... enabling terrible authors to publish books as if they were games when otherwise we might have been spared the pollution. So, just like no professional writing took place here, no professional software development took place, either. Visual novels/e-books are the worst way to try read a book (and they're always written far worse than real books too). Imagine reading your favorite book, be that War and Peace or The Davinci Code (are you ok??), but you have to click the mouse for every single sentence that appears. You'd hate it. It's a garbage way to try read a book... and even if it wasn't, this still isn't a game. Now imagine that clicking experience, but with utterly cringe anime club fan-fiction writing. If the author had any talent, they'd be in on bookshelves. This garbage only ended up on Steam because they paid $100 to self-publish since no real publisher would take them. There's no reason for this to be on Steam when it could just be a webpage... e-books are just a bunch of cringe text and (usually character generator created) static 2D imagery. You don't buy an expensive gaming PC to use it for something your web browser can do for free. A peak of 4 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 4 copies. That's what failure looks like. While this garbage cringe e-book has no up-front cost, you can find genuinely professionally written novels and comics at a public library or through websites like Project Gutenberg. Your PC isn't a Kindle, and I can't recommend non-game e-book visual novels to people looking for PC games.