Embracing Darkness

[h1]Before I played Embracing Darkness, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good[/h1]

"Embracing Darkness" 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 garbage e-book is a copyright infringing unauthorised duplication/derivative work from the Japanese copyrighted Dogengers TV series, wholly owned and governed the Dogengers Production Committee in Japan. So, basically we have a completely cringey fan-fiction where the developer makes characters from someone else's show into his imaginary anime boyfriends. The cringe here goes to 11. 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 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 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 2 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 2 copies to satisfy the entire world's demand for it. While this E-book has no up-front cost, you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. 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. [quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says: [quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote] The developer demands that it's not copyright infringement if he personally doesn't want it to be. We'll wait and see if and when the DMCA takedown arrives. Regardless, the creative bankruptcy of stealing other people's intellectual property and turning it into a cringey slash fiction because the author wants to date the fictional characters is weaponised cringe. This should (and has) been avoided by all... with only two concurrent readers, presumably the "author" and his court appointed lawyer, we can see this is simply garbage that nobody on Steam wanted, yet the "author" of this garbage seems very keen to draw attention to his IP theft. Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this cringey high school anime club dropout fan-fiction to anyone.