Dreams of Solari - Chapter 1

"Dreams of Solari - Chapter 1" 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. "Dreams of Solari - Chapter 1" is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game... except it's not a full e-book either! This just like the first chapter in some godawful fan-fiction and the "author" expects you'll go pay money or something to get the rest of it. This is never okay. As an advertisement for 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 garbage e-book is a dark sci-fi (not cyberpunk) high school sci-fi club dropout fan-fiction, just the first part because the author couldn't be bothered to finish the book (let alone invest in a spell checker apparently). The bad writing is punctuated by grammatical and spelling errors, all of which is a sprinkling of broken glass on a rusty nail sandwich of awful literature. The developer abandoned their e-book when they discovered after publishing this advertisement for it that nobody read it or wanted it. Who knew. 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 4 concurrent readers... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. The funny thing is, if you wanted to print this book, you'd only need to print 4 copies to satisfy the entire world's demand for it. This isn't a game and it's not even a complete book, it's just a badly made advertisement for a fan-fiction. E-books aren't games, and neither are advertisements. You deserve better than being advertised to. These advertisments are harmful because they're taking up marketing and space that should more correctly given to real, genuine game developers who do the right thing and make real games for gamers.