If you're *really* enthusiastic about novelty games and you have a strong-ish computer, this is a good game for you.
I'll ignore the technical issues, because what really bugs me are two compounding problems. The core of the game is a fighting game interpretation of a bunch of novelists, but:
1)This isn't much of a fighting game
2)It provides very low-quality interpretations of most of the authors involved
Let's start with 1), since I believe it's something the devs might actually fix. Simply put, there is very little to the game.
There is no throw or any equivalent, so the normal strike - block - throw RPS is completely absent from the game. It's also an MK-style button-based blocking system, removing cross-ups, so literally the only hard mix-up in the game is low vs overhead, which is both rather boring and tilts the game far in the direction of overly-defensive gameplay, since it's so likely that you will be able to block until the attacker is at disadvantage.
Even if there were cross-ups, I don't think it would matter outside of a couple of characters because, while there are certainly moves that would cross up with their air normals, the jumps are so floaty that you are even more of a sitting duck on jump in than in a normal fighting game, and the majority of characters have at least a basic uppercut anti-air (because this is bootleg MK)
There are some MK target combos, but these are brief, few in number, and uninteresting. Like MK, there is no normal canceling, but hitstun doesn't seem to be balanced properly to compensate and let you combo to a meaningful extent. You can usually get a couple of hits in, but nothing much more than that, and then you leave yourself open because most of the moves are nonetheless low-knockback.
The entire system is poorly thought out and the framedata is skewed against the attacker.
In an effort to make it accessible, there are dedicated buttons for specials. I have nothing against this, though one button per move is pretty inelegant, but again they have no way of compensating for the shortcomings of this method and, in fact, make it worse than it needs to be. Because specials aren't bound to normals, there is only one version per special other than ones that transform the character (i.e. Joyce and LAA's stance switch). This further diminishes the variety available to the player. To add insult to injury, the specials are all on cooldowns like this is a MOBA, and some of the timers are quite long, meaning you spend most of the game missing a significant portion of your character's toolkit if you try to make use of it.
Seemingly every choice was made to make the game as plodding as possible, and the weird insta-kill gimmick doesn't help that much, especially since the stage is so large (and there's no carry because there aren't substantial combos, especially into horizontal launchers!), plus there's also healing and the author arena gimmick, where the character specific gimmicks seem to vary from "almost completely worthless" to "death in 10 seconds". Ironically, the author with the strongest arena, Manzoni, also has easily one of the best carries in the game in the form of his melee special.
In short, it just isn't very enjoyable as a fighting game, it's just a worse Mortal Kombat with a bunch of different comeback gimmicks and no special meter.
If there are nuances that I am missing here, it is not helped by there being literally no documentation of the vast majority of character movesets in the game, even as a text bubble.
On to the second point, which is that it doesn't depict the authors in a compelling or interesting way.
The character quality varies wildly. There are "passable" ones like Lovecraft, who is boring and shallow but at least has traces of what he is known for in his moves, to "bad" like I'm inclined to assign to Shakespeare, whose Arena is solid if you ignore the Wiki but whose specials are nonsensical. Dostoevsky is also here for basically being an Axe Elemental. Yes, I know it's meant to be Crime and Punishment, but it fails to even that because it's literally just him doing beat-em-up attacks using axes as props. He's closer to being Dante (from DMC, not Alighieri) than Dostoevsky.
Then, beyond bad, there is the "nearly nothing" level of Dumas, who just throws a wine bottle for his only special despite being best known for writing "The Three Musketeers", which has a fair bit of sword fighting. It's like the devs are allergic to having a character swing a sword.
But there's a level below "nearly nothing," and that's "dogwater," which includes Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, who is in competition for being the most screwed-over of any character here, because the devs seemed to think "let's include a token Japanese guy to appeal to Japanese fighting game enthusiasts," picked the most famous one, and then said "what do we do for his moveset? well, he's Japanese, so let's have him do ninja stuff!" My problem isn't even that it's "offensive," but that it's just bad writing. The dude wrote interesting and iconic novels and he's stuck here doing substitution jutsus and iaido! The devs surely knew that ninja fiction has novels associated with it, and they could just pick one of those authors if they just wanted to do superficial weeb stuff, right? It's like if they put Lovecraft in the game but just had him fire an AK-47 and eat hamburgers to regain health because he's American. It's stupid.
Perhaps yet worse, the devs somehow believed it made sense to have a character named "Latin American Author", a hideous visual composite of like five different authors, who on top of it all just does capoeira instead of representing any of those authors! It makes sense, they struggled to represent one author in one character for the rest of the cast, so how else could representing five go? The actual capoeira moves that make up all of his normals are actually pretty well-animated, but that doesn't really help.
I just can't imagine the thought process that led to them thinking this was a good idea. Even with Akutagawa I can see how lazy chauvinism would produce that, but here? I'm baffled! Imagine if they took Doestoevsky and Tolstoy, along with a Pole and a Fin and made a composite "Slavic Author" who attacks using Russian shoot wrestling! But don't worry, because two specials would be using an ax, like how Latin American Author uses ice because of some reference I don't get.
The only character I'd say they did a "sort of good" job on is Hemingway, which surely in part because he's really the best suited to the basis of the game, but that just means it was smart of them to include him. He still isn't great, two of his moves are just throwing a wine glass and drinking alcohol, and one I can't figure out because it is labeled "kick", but his summoning a bull is cool and his stage is alright. I feel like they fumbled unnecessarily by having the giant bell not actually toll, since it's supposed to be a reference to For Whom the Bell Tolls, but the representation of looming death with the bell slowly tracking the opponent and falling on them, killing them instantly, is honestly a really good bit and the devs should feel good about that one.
At base, I just don't understand why this game exists. The devs don't seem to have much enthusiasm for fighting games, even the seeming one game they play -- Mortal Kombat -- because mechanically the game is the lamest one I've ever seen that wasn't made in Flash (rip). Literally go look up shovelware fighting games here on Steam, even the unbearably ugly $2 ones probably play better than this.
But that problem would make sense if the devs were just bookworms and were approaching it from that angle, but then they might have actually bothered to read more of these authors! I would forgive the mechanical lacking if the characters consistently demonstrated enthusiasm in the concepts that they embody, but they do not.
