局外人 L'Etranger

"局外人 L'Etranger" 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 Chinese e-book spans two topics, both awful. One, a political experiment that presumably incinerated the authors social credit score as he goes on and on about how bad China is. Secondly, of course, like so many other cringey high school anime club fan-fictions on Steam, the author relates his fantasy of dating a variety of high school girls. It's weird, creepy and disturbing that the author has a bunch of highschoolers for imaginary girlfriends. It must be difficult having imaginary high school girlfriends when you're not allowed within 200m of a school. This e-book isn't that linear and works more as a Choose Your Own Adventure, but the point still stands... nobody read a CYOA book and then said "Wow, what a great game I just played." Books aren't games. 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 less than 100 concurrent readers, they couldn't even break three figures, and now there's basically nobody reading it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected 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.