Ruby Heart [Visual Novel / Otome]

"Ruby Heart [Visual Novel / Otome]" 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 poorly written e-book is square in the middle of what we expect from e-books on Steam Direct.. a garbage tier high school anime club dropout fan-fiction all about the authors imaginary girlfriend (you wouldn't know her, she goes to another school). Needless to say the cringe here is intense, but we should expect little else when fan-fiction writers dump their fan-fiction imaginary girlfriend e-books onto Steam like this. In this case the imaginary anime girlfriend is a fantasy princess or something... it's so cringe I couldn't get far before I had to throw up. This was slapped together with the godawful Ren'Py visual novel construction kit... enabling terrible authors to publish books as if they were games when otherwise we might have been spared the pollution. So, just like no professional writing took place here, no professional software development took place, either. 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 2 concurrent readers... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. The funny thing is, if you wanted to print this book, you'd only need to print 2 copies to satisfy the entire world's demand for it. While this E-book has no up-front cost, you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. 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.

Me llamó mucho la atención la primera vez que lo ví en el catálogo de Steam y quise probarlo, realmente no esperaba que captara mi atención, pero lo hizo, y ahora estoy cautivada por esta historia y espero su continuación , si el juego se hace de paga luego, yo pagaría por jugarlo porque su historia es muy atractiva e interesante.

Should have read the game introduction or review before playing. I wasn't aware that this was a demo/prologue lol. Anyway, I played through it: UI: 5/10, looks like Ren'Py engine's default UI with some personal touch. Art: 7.5/10, Additional point for the amount of illustrations (and it's only prologue!) Plot: 6.5/10, As the tag said - "story rich." It was intended to be intriguing, but ended up to be a little bit of a drag because of the long-winded script. Overall score: For an indie game, it is okay. I would buy it just to support the creator (if the full game ever come out at all).

Красивая добрая сказка. Слог Зела Грэйвордса как всегда хорош. [spoiler] Игра "в раннем доступе", так что чем закончатся приключения миленькой принцессочки пока неведомо [/spoiler]

Lo que he podido jugar me ha encantado, es una historia que te atrapa, es una pena que me respondieran que no van a continuar con el juego...

莫名有吸引力的故事。

Una excelente novela visual, se nota el trabajo y el cariño, pero lamentablemente está sin terminar y actualmente parece estar abandonada. Es una pena porque me gustó este comienzo. Espero que algún día la continúen, pero lo veo difícil.