SKUFS AND ALT-GIRLS is not a game, it's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. The vast majority of this E-book is 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 particular E-Book/CYOA does have some "stats", numbers added to create the illusion of gameplay, and a couple of ploddingly shallow, minor minigames that really are less effort than turning the page on a physical book. So these numbers are less meaningful than the stats in an old Fighting Fantasy novel, and have little bearing on the various E-book endings this visual novel provides. Nobody finished reading a Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because books aren't games. And neither is this.
The idea behind this godawful E-book is you pretend to be a girl and you take a slob and try to turn him into a reasonable man, which is incredibly ironic because it's obvious the author is the latter and never talked to the former before.
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.
The poor quality of this E-Book is 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 8 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?
SKUFS AND ALT-GIRLS has the ridiculous price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this E-Book could get you games like "Dishonored", "Fallout 4" or "Metro 2033". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
This E-Book features a number of suspicious, likely fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the E-Book launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the E-Book, and all have very similar wording and writing style (in Russian, what a surprise). Immediately after this huge peak of reviews, reviews (and reader counts) for the book dropped incredibly sharply. This is highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor reader counts. The "Positive" review score on this E-Book should be taken with a large grain of salt. This might have been done to deceive/mislead gamers into paying for a bad product.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this E-Book as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the E-Book (to date). Until this status changes, this E-Book will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this E-Book.[/quote]
