Where the Music Dies

"Where the Music Dies" isn't a game, it's a cringey non-game high school anime club dropout fan-fiction that's been dumped on Steam into the games section. As a visual novel, it doesn't have any gameplay. It's just a lot of clicking through bad, cringe dialogue that no real publisher would ever accept. When people can't get their work published in print, they pay the $100 fee to dump their fan-fiction here instead, where we have to put up with it when looking for things that are actual PC games. This e-book thankfully eschews the usual subject of most non-game Steam e-books (being a high school anime club fan-fiction about the author and his imaginary girlfriend) and instead we have an attempt at grief counselling or something where you talk to a number of characters who are probably just the authors imaginary girlfriends. Oh, they are. Ok, I was wrong, this is yet another high school anime club dropout fan-fiction about the author and his imaginary girlfriends. We really can't get away from that with these cringey e-book writers, can we? No, we can't. Why oh why does Steam need to be a dumping ground for high school anime club dropout fan-fictions? The author relates his fantasy of talking to a bunch of depressed imaginary girlfriends. I think we can guess what made them depressed. This was made using the Ren'Py e-book construction kit, which lets people who aren't developers create godawfully bad e-books that they then pretend are actually PC games. Just like no real writing talent was involved in this garbage, it's no surprise that no real software development happened here either. Ren'Py is just a shortcut for polluting the store with non-game e-book garbage. Visual novels/e-books are the worst way to try read a book (and they're always written far worse than real books too). Imagine reading your favorite book, be that War and Peace or The Davinci Code (are you ok??), but you have to click the mouse for every single sentence that appears. You'd hate it. It's a garbage way to try read a book... and even if it wasn't, this still isn't a game. Now take that annoying clicking and add utterly cringey high-school anime club dropout writing to it. Real authors are published in print and found in Barnes & Noble. This garbage only ended up on Steam because they paid $100 to self-publish, because let's face it, professional publishers would not only reject this garbage they saw it, they'd take out restraining orders. E-books are just a collection of cringe writing and badly generated character imagery (usually done with a construction kit/image generator). So it might as well be a web page. We don't spend thousands on gaming rigs just to use them for what might as well be reading a website. A peak of 4 concurrent readers for a free visual novel/e-book is a disaster. Out of 130 million potential gamers, almost nobody was interested. That level of rejection speaks for how badly written this is. To put this into perspective, to satisfy the global demand for this book, you'd only ever need to print 4 copies. That's what failure looks like. This isn't even free... "content" for this high school anime club fan-fiction is locked behind a $3 paywall, which unlocks two more of the authors imaginary girlfriends for you to read about. You don't know them, they go to a different school. In Canada. While this garbage cringe e-book has no up-front cost, you can find genuinely professionally written novels and comics at a public library or through websites like Project Gutenberg. Your PC isn't a Kindle, and I can't recommend non-game e-book visual novels to people looking for PC games. Trying to address serious issues such as mental and emotional health through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good. The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful. It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to address mental health issues. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get attention/fame by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.