Sigh of the Abyss: Shadow Bonds

"Sigh of the Abyss: Shadow Bonds" isn't a game. It looks like an e-book dumped on Steam masquerading as a game, but it's not that either! This is an advert! This is just the "try before you buy" intro to some cringe fan-fiction, and the "author" expects you to pay money for the rest... imagine paying money for someone's high school anime club dropout fan-fiction. Ugh. This is never okay. There is no gameplay here because this is just an advert for a garbage high school anime club dropout fan-fiction e-book. It is full of cringey dialogue and amateur writing that would be rejected by any actual book publisher... leaving the "author" of this garbage to shove it onto Steam Direct. Here is the link to the actual demo publishing process that this author ignored to exploit the Steam store: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos In case you're interested (nope) this high school anime club dropout fan-fiction e-book that's being advertised is all about the author and his LGBTQIA+ friendly fantasy of having a bunch of various magical vampire boyfriends and girlfriends and totally getting to third base with all of his boyfriends and girlfriends. The writing, unsurprisingly, is pure, weaponized cringe that's so bad it may be against the Geneva Conventions. Visual novels are tedious at best. Imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or Twilight (kidding), but translate it to a format where you've to click your mouse for every single sentence instead of just turning pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now take that annoying clicking and add utterly cringey high-school anime club dropout writing to it. Real authors are published in print and found in Barnes & Noble. This garbage only ended up on Steam because they paid $100 to self-publish, because let's face it, professional publishers would not only reject this garbage they saw it, they'd take out restraining orders. There's no reason for this to be on Steam when it could just be a webpage... e-books are just a bunch of cringe text and (usually character generator created) static 2D imagery. You don't buy an expensive gaming PC to use it for something your web browser can do for free. Worse, and inexplicably, this advertisement for an e-book has PAID DLC. Why does an ADVERTISEMENT need PAID DLC???? The author behind this garbage wants you to give him money to support his abuse of Steam by dumping advertisements in the wrong place. Jesus wept. Despite having no other cost apart from the beggarware DLC, this failed to appeal to gamers. SteamDB shows this peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent readers, and now there's basically nobody using it. This was a dismal public reception. It's easy to see why gamers rejected it. This isn't a game and it's not even a complete book. It's a badly made advertisement for fan-fiction. E-books aren't games, and neither are advertisements. You deserve better than being advertised to. These taking up space on the store is harmful to real developers who make real games.