"Return of Red Riding Hood Enhanced Edition" 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.
This E-book is basically Russian shovelware designed to pollute Steam and generate roubles through selling points shop items and trading cards... it was never intended to be a real, serious game (or even e-book).
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 some other language 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.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the E-Book is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Return of Red Riding Hood Enhanced Edition" 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 launching the E-book, trivial to achieve, but less than 7 percent of players bothered to get 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 readers reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in reader counts for the E-Book. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 7 percent of readers bothered playing the E-Book for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this E-Book to have so many concurrent readers who didn't bother engaging with this E-Book? Trading cards. People 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 readers 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 E-Books like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
"Return of Red Riding Hood Enhanced Edition" is relatively cheap at $3 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 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
