Harrowed World: What's Past Is Portents

"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.

Wonderful stories! Can't wait for upcoming content.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ https://youtu.be/miFEev6UewU

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I am way overdue in leaving this review. If you're a fan of dark thrillers that will put you at the edge of your seat, wondering what is to come around the corner, look no further than this gem! Plus, it has Vampires. Where could you go wrong?? The art style is wonderfully done. There are a few different outcomes based on your choices as well, so it warrants multiple playthroughs in order to see the full aspect of the story. This is just one of many stories to come. Plus, it's free! The dev does a good job at including peoples input to the game. You truly have nothing to lose when playing this. Visual novels are not usually my style, but I can't wait for the DLC's for this! I owe the developer a thanks for including me in the creator program as well!

Easy Achievements, 100% / 3min.