Paper Shakespeare: To Date Or Not To Date? 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 presents 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.
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.
This E-book Choose-Your-Own-Adventure formatted as a "dating sim" has only two notable distinctions to distance itself from all the other craptastic awful E-books polluting Steam and pretending they're games. It's a Shakespeare themed (but badly, the author didn't have a fantastic grasp on the works of the bard), and it's got very, very badly done amateur drawings instead of the usual anime character generator art assets that most "authors" use when polluting Steam with non-game garbage. Which really serves as an additional deterrent.
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.
As with all Ren'Py template copy + pastes, there's no options to change the resolution for the E-book or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for readers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this E-book will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for readers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The poor quality of this E-book is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak reader number was only 3 readers. That's right, only 3. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only reader activity occurs 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 and well over 50,000 (actual) games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the E-book is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason. E-books aren't games.
Paper Shakespeare: To Date Or Not To Date? didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the E-book, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-book didn't really capture any interest from readers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for reading the first, short chapter, and only around 34 percent of readers bothered to get that far before deleting the E-book, less than half the readers. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the E-book. Imagine you wrote a book so bad that only one in three people bothered to read all the way to the end. I guess that's why this garbage gets published on Steam instead of in bookstores.
Paper Shakespeare: To Date Or Not To Date? has the total ripoff price of around $9 USD (Plus a completely deranged $13 USD of crap, pointless DLC, bringing this up to a $22 USD, almost AAA priced crap E-book!), it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality (actual) 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.
