"HeartWare" 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 short and awful e-book is exactly what it looks like and exactly what so many garbage e-book fan-fictions on Steam are... a high school anime club dropout fan-fiction about the authors imaginary girlfriend, a little anime girl. This one features an underaged girl, so this is equal parts horrible cringe and utter creepiness. It's tough having an imaginary high school girlfriend when you're not allowed within 200m of a school.
In this book the author fantasizes about a dating sim style discussion with his imaginary girlfriend and that's about it. There's zero literary value in this creepy cringe.
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.
A peak of [b]4 concurrent readers[/b] for a "free" visual novel is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential gamers here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for just how badly written this fan-fiction is.
The truly comical part of this, is that in order to satisfy the entire global demand for this badly written e-book, you'd only ever need to print 4 copies of 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.
