"Love in the Glen" 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. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad Tyrano 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.
Now, this E-book does have a really, really crap Match-3 Bejewelled ripoff minigame in it, so much as this is pretending to be a real novel, it's also pretending to be a crappy mobile app, and I can state categorically it isn't successful at being either. So I stand by my "not a game" position.
This pathetically bad E-Book is some kind of attempt from an adult "author" to imagine he's in an anime high school drama, so the cringe factor here is dialled in beyond the limits of the Geneva Convention. Yes, this e-book is weaponised cringe.
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.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
These technical defects push this game 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 read it. "Love in the Glen" has achievements (BOOKS DON'T NEED ACHIEVEMENTS FFS), and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book absolutely failed to capture any interest from readers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for selecting the Choose Your Own Adventure option of following "Finn" to Norway, trivial to achieve, but less than 8 percent of readers bothered to get that far before abandoning the E-Book. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of readers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
"Love in the Glen" has the pathetically optimistic price of around $6 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. 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.
