"Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2" 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 e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit.
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.
On the matter of plot and substance, this has little to none. The favourite subject of all amateur developers, the corpse of HP Lovecraft has once more been exhumed so that a craptastic ripoff of his works could be created, because much as amateur developers typically lack the capability to come up with their own game designs, quality assets etc, they're also usually unable to come up with original plot ideas, and this trashheap is no exception. Why can't amateur developers leave Lovecraft alone???
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.
On the upside, the E-Book does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
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. "Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. All of the achievements have a 2.5% accomplishment rate which implies an incredibly low number of readers... it's mathematically improbable everyone who read this E-book chose all the same Choose Your Own Adventure options to get all the same achievements as everyone else who read it. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered reading this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this E-Book was with readers reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy 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 3 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.
So, should you buy this E-Book? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
"Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2" has the far too high price of $11 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $11 asking price for this game could get you games like "Mass Effect Trilogy Pack", "Kingdom Come Deliverance" or "Disco Elysium". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. 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.
