落华居 (2019)

落华居 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. There's no English translation for the E-Book, but that's ok. It turns out, the language of bad writing is universal. This badly written Chinese E-book covers the topics of romance and E-sports, which in fact have nothing to do with one another, so you can see the "author" of this train wreck is acting out some weird fanfiction fantasy... definitely worth avoiding at all costs. 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…

Visual novel with some - but few - choices, which do have consequences in the story, so that alone would set it above 99% of other visual novels, however, the story is besotting. The main character leaves school to practice playing an e-sport game, finds a photograph which then turns into four girls and the story continues in an usual jejune visual-novel manner... Eventually some choices are presented, and depending on what the player selects the game has multiple endings, most very short, and the most expanded one is taking a part in some MOBA trash match... at which point I just fast forwarded to the end. The artworks in the game were pleasant to my eyes, even though I usually detest anime style, nonetheless the game has nothing else to go for it.