The Far Rings: A Space Opera Visual Novella

The Far Rings: A Space Opera Visual Novella is a nice, rather short but still quite interesting, atmospheric sci-fi visual novel. Plus, it's free and has achievements, there's a steam guide if you have some trouble finding them all. So, I'd definitely recommend to have a look at this novel.

"The Far Rings" is not a game. It's an e-book ("Visual novel" is another term that writers use when trying to disguise an e-book as a game) that's been launched on Steam as a game, despite not being one. 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 presents 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. There's a science fiction theme and some very badly made hand-drawn style "art" to accompany the novel. It's difficult to ascertain whether the art is worse or "better" than the writing, but no matter what, anyone on the receiving end of this garbage is not a winner. 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. Because this is not a game, and I can only recommend games to gamers, I can't recommend this badly written e-book. If you want a good e-book, try Project Gutenberg or the Amazon Kindle store, and perhaps stop looking at video game stores in hopes of finding a book, much in the same way you shouldn't go shopping for seafood in a tyre shop.

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🐊 The Reef Recommends You To Try This! 🐊

https://youtu.be/ptDtxI7jRXo Doing a lot with a small cast, and what appears to be a small budget, this visual novel has just enough quality writing to make it worth the brief playtime.

short but nice

On of these days I will actually pay attention to the story of a visual novel games, today is not that day. Easy game to get the achievements on if that's your thing.

A pretty good Visual Novel. Only real flaw is that the NB love interest is from an alien race who don't have genders. Not great representation. I did like them though.