Disturbed: Beyond Aramor 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 $100 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 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 E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this.
There's some really, really badly done high school art class dropout artwork to go on the pages of this E-book, which makes the whole experience worse. In fact the most amusing part of this horror themed E-book is counting all the spelling and grammatical errors... I mean seriously, if you're going to make the poor decision to dump an E-book onto Steam, at least run a spellchecker over it first. Is that too hard to ask?
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.
Disturbed: Beyond Aramor 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 readers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for getting to one of the endings for the Choose Your Own Adventure book, trivial to get, but less than 14 percent of readers 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 readers reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in reader counts for the E-Book. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 14 percent of readers bothered playing the E-Book for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this E-Book to have so many concurrent readers 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 readers 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.
So, should you buy this E-Book? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Disturbed: Beyond Aramor has the pathetically optimistic price of around $5 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. 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.
