New Tricks for Old Gods

New Tricks for Old Gods 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 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. There's a sci-fi "cyberpunk" theme to this e-book, hoping to hook people into thinking because the genre is popular and yet somehow comes across as still being "edgy", that it's from an actual author. Unfortunately the general rule about Ren'py construction kit jobs holds true here, and this is reflected by the poor public reception of this e-book on Steam. 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. The poor quality of this e-book is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game only ever reached a peak reader count of only 8 readers. That's right, only 8. This is a pitiful enough number, and now, activity occurs only once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam, the overwhelming lack of interest in the e-book is remarkable, but also to be expected. This complete and utter rejection of the e-book from readers should be a keen information point for anyone considering buying shovelware like this. Readers just didn't take this seriously, and for good reason. New Tricks for Old Gods is relatively cheap at $2 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. 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.