"Heart and Seoul" 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.
One caveat here, the game does include a match-3 minigame, very poorly done thanks to the Tyrano construction kit. The quality of the minigame is low, and it's the type of game you can play for free on the web or on mobile, so for the purpose of this review I'll disregard that component... I don't feel the presence of this minigame is going to be a compelling, decisive factor in any purchases for this e-book.
This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad Tyrano 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. Likewise the character images are generated and not by any means genuinely, sincerely created art. It's all construction kit stuff... the only thing that came out of this e-book that really was the product of the "author" is the writing... and man, it is terrible.
This is a dating-sim style e-book with a very linear plotline and only a couple of endings. The theme, obviously, is about dating Korean men, which, even for the world of literature, is incredibly niche and unappealing to readers in general. Just like nobody said "What a fun game" after reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book, this also isn't a game.
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.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the E-Book is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Heart and Seoul" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for reading to the end of the e-book, trivial to achieve, but less than 9 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the E-Book. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this E-Book was with readers reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy 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 9 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?
"Heart and Seoul" is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. 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.
