MMM: Murder Most Misfortunate is not a game, it's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure e-book/audio 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 (and badly voice acted) 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?".
To answer that question: 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 E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this.
In fairness there's a couple of minigames, but wading through piles of badly written and badly voiced VN trash to find them just isn't worth the effort.
The artwork here is mediocre at best, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is lacklustre, it's not a selling point. While there are options to change the resolution for the E-Book, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the E-Book, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
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.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the E-Book is, we can measure the interest in a book by how much people bothered to read it. MMM: Murder Most Misfortunate 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 Chapter 1, trivial to achieve, but less than 3 percent of players bothered to read 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 players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the E-Book. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 percent of players bothered playing the E-Book for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this E-Book to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the E-Book? Trading cards. Players 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 players 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 games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
MMM: Murder Most Misfortunate has the cash grab price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. 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.
