Broken Minds is barely a game, it's a Ren'Py e-book that's been dumped on Steam. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature much in the way of 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. There are some simple puzzles in the E-book, kind of like getting halfway through a Dan Brown disaster (but the writing here is worse than Dan Brown, if such a thing is possible) and discovering a kid's maze in the middle of the book. These minigames can largely be disregarded, they're terrible, and the focus here is simply trying to publish a book on Steam.
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.
The E-Book only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this E-Book has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.
These technical defects push this E-Book 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. Broken Minds has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the e-book, trivial to achieve, but less than 9 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the E-Book. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
The poor quality of this E-Book is also 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 5 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?
Broken Minds has the insane price of around $7 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 $7 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 2", "The Walking Dead" or "Dragon Age: Origins".
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.
