Unhack 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.
There is a minigame stapled onto the E-book, a really badly made Adobe Flash tier pathing puzzle minigame slapped together with Py'Game, the game engine that should be taken out the back yard and... err... "gone to live on a farm with all the other animals". PyGame is terrible, and nothing good ever came out of it, and if you want proof, let me present Exhibit "A": "Unhack 2".
Regardless, the presence of a minigame changes the "Book first" nature of this E-book, and doesn't make it a game any more than stapling a lottery ticket to the front page of a novel would make it a casino. So, what's the book about? It's the second book in a badly written series about an anime/manga art hacker girl. Amazing. I am lost, why aren't publishers lining up to be the ones to put this on the NYT Best Sellers list?
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.
Unhack 2 didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the E-Book, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for reading the first pages of the E-book, trivial to get, but less than 24 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the E-Book. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the E-Book.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this E-Book was with readers reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in reader counts for the E-Book. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the E-Book... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. 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 no 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?
Unhack 2 has the gamer gouging price of around $6 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 $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "Dishonored", "Mass Effect 3" or "Payday 2". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
