Paranoia: Deliver Me is not a game, it's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure 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?".
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.
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.
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 E-Book has been translated from Chinese into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers.
Paranoia: Deliver Me 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 gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for reading the first chapter, trivial to get, but less than 27 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the E-Book. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the E-Book.
The poor quality of this E-Book is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak reader number was only 15 readers. 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality E-Book is to be expected.
So, should you buy this E-Book? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Paranoia: Deliver Me 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
