苍空的彼端

«По ту сторону лазурного неба» — бесплатная короткая текстовая новелла в фэнтезийном сеттинге: писатель Сен Хай приезжает в деревню Облачного Кита, чтобы восстановить силы, и встречает загадочную девушку Лин, которая утверждает, что книга в руках Сен Хая может предсказывать будущее — и просит отвести её домой, следуя указаниям этой книги. История линейная, без альтернативных веток, объёмом около 60 000 иероглифов; прохождение занимает 1–2 часа. Плюсы: искренняя и трогательная история — несмотря на скромные рамки дебютной работы, игра умело сплетает фэнтези, повседневность и юмор, создавая эмоционально насыщенный рассказ, который цепляет и оставляет тёплое послевкусие; озвучка героини и атмосфера — голос Лин придаёт персонажу живость, а фоновые изображения на основе реальных фотографий в сочетании с музыкой создают неожиданно уютное, мечтательное настроение. Минусы: минимальная интерактивность — выбор почти отсутствует, и игрок скорее читает книгу с картинками, чем влияет на события, что снижает ощущение участия в истории; короткая и линейная — единственная сюжетная линия и малый объём означают, что после одного прохождения возвращаться не к чему, а история обрывается, не успев раскрыть часть promising тем. Итог: милая и душевная дебютная новелла для тех, кто любит короткие эмоциональные истории с фэнтезийным налётом. Подойдёт поклонникам визуальных новелл, которым важна атмосфера и искренность, а не глубокая вариативность или масштабный лор.

If I only judged by the dlc quality, Id recommend it. But the base games flaws and plot holes cant be fixed that way. The voice actin has zero emotion throughout, which makes it hard to feel connected to the story. The biggest issue tho is the writer clearly got a bad case of pretentiousness. All those constant quotes and references make what should be simple sentences feel bloated, and it actually kills the atmosphere at times.

"苍空的彼端" 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 a lot of cringe in these e-books that get dumped on Steam, they are almost always about the authors imaginary anime girlfriend/waifu. But this one is just plain wrong... it's about the author going out to a park, finding a young child, a girl who claims to have magical powers and asks that the author takes her home with him. So he does. Someone call the police. This was slapped together with the godawful Ren'Py visual novel construction kit... enabling terrible authors to publish books as if they were games when otherwise we might have been spared the pollution. So, just like no professional writing took place here, no professional software development took place, either. 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. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 13 concurrent readers... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. The funny thing is, if you wanted to print this book, you'd only need to print 13 copies to satisfy the entire world's demand for it. While this E-book has no up-front cost, you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. 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. But seriously this is an e-book about a grown man finding a girl in a park and taking her home with him. Holy crap dude.