"The Pancake Paradox" 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 is a nonsensical high school anime club dropout fan-fiction from Korea about the authors imaginary girlfriends who apparently make pancakes while the world burns. Despite being a short story, even then the author couldn't be bothered finishing it. Yet thought it would be okay to dump this on Steam through Steam Direct anyway, because, I guess there's not enough garbage on Steam yet?
This was slapped together with the godawful RPG Maker JRPG construction kit... enabling amateurs to publish JRPG fan-fictions as if they were genuinely made 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. The author couldn't even work out how to use RPG Maker to make a JRPG.
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.
This isn't even free, while the author abandoned this 2 months ago, if he ever finished it he was going to charge money through DLC due to some financial distress he's suffering from. Far be it for me to comment
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.
