Harrowed World: What's Past Is Portents

Such a great story! The writing was superb and kept me intrigued! I had so many questions at the end of the VN and it left me wanting more of what lingers in it's hallowed halls! I truly can't wait for the next installment!! Well done to the dev! 🩷

This game is amazing has a great storyline and the dev is a sweetheart

This gets my beard of approval. An intriguing and captivating intro to a game world. Absolutely amazing music. Left me eager to see how the world develops. Did I mention it is free?

I enjoyed playing, it's free good story and achievements what's not to like

The first chapter was fun to play and the various choices and dialogue were nice! Looking forward to the future chapters! !

story line could be better it's a typical visual novel with multiple choice answers

"Harrowed World: What's Past Is Portents - Gothic Vampire Visual Novel" 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 badly written e-book garbage is just another high school goth club dropout fan-fiction about the authors imaginary girlfriend, who is a vampire. You thought anime fan-fictions were cringey, you ain't seen nothing yet. The cringe that comes out of goth fan-fictions is immense. 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 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 3 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 3 copies to satisfy the entire world's demand for it. This e-book isn't free, it's not complete, the "author" has locked the full fan-fiction behind an as-yet unreleased paid DLC... which I am sure the three people who tried reading this will be rushing to snap up. Can't get enough badly written goth fan-fiction cringe, right guys? Ugh. 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.