Man of Sterling Quality

><> This felt like it was written by someone on a bad trip or a 12 year old trying their best to be random and quirky. Half the time nothing made sense, the other half of the time the game was trying to be funny but came off more offensive than anything. I played about 20 mins to see if it would get any better and just couldn't justify wasting my time longer then that. <><

Man of Sterling Quality is not a game, it's an incomplete e-book that's been dumped on Steam Early Access 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 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy 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. This is some kind of garbage 14 year old highschool social rejects attempt at making a surreal "funny" edgy story, the garbage writing is pure incoherent dribble. The artwork here is terrible, it's some of the most amateurish MS-Paint/Fischer-Prices "Baby's first Wacom tablet" style drawings (I won't deign to call these "illustrations"). It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can do graphics properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the visuals included with this e-book is extremely low as a result of these decisions. 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 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. The e-book (not game) has been in Early Access since early 2022 and while it's still getting updates, it's deep in Development Hell. There's no reasonable expectation that this will ever be completed. Whether the developer lacks the time, funds, or skill/talent required to complete a video game isn't really something gamers should be expected to accept as an excuse. Unethically, the developer sold keys to this unfinished and likely abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers. 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. This is a perfect example of why Steam needs quality control. This is garbage with no merit, not even a game, not even complete, abusing Steam Early Access and Steam Direct, and it's already being sold in bundles, purely as a cash grab.

This was one of the worst games I have played, how do these things land on Steam? Half of the game makes zero sense, other half is trying to be funny - but fails.