Rainbow Heights Academy: Year 1

☀️

It's a CYA VN in high school with some light RPG mechanics (a stats system and different builds). Story has fewer mistakes than the typical Steam VN. Not for me really but I'll give it a thumbs up because the crow did.

Rainbow Heights Academy: Year 1 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 isn't even a complete e-book, it's just chapter 1 (presumably the "author" intended to charge money for more fan-fiction cringe but never got around to writing it). Anyway this is once more your usual high school anime club dropout fan-fiction cringeware... and of course it's all about the authors favourite topic, his imaginary girlfriend/waifu. The cringe is almost guaranteed to make you throw up in your mouth a bit. 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. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 2 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 2 copies to satsify the entire world's demand for it. While this E-book is "free", 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.

Игра 'Rainbow Heights Academy: Year 1' оставила приятное впечатление. Яркий визуальный стиль и хорошо проработанные персонажи сразу привлекают внимание. Сюжет, хоть и не революционный, достаточно увлекателен, чтобы затянуть на несколько часов прохождения. Очень понравилась система выбора, которая действительно влияет на развитие истории и отношения с другими студентами. Однако, иногда диалоги кажутся немного затянутыми, а мини-игры – чересчур простыми. Не хватает большей интерактивности с окружающим миром. В целом, игра предлагает захватывающий опыт для любителей визуальных новелл с элементами симуляции жизни. С нетерпением жду продолжения! Рекомендую тем, кто ищет лёгкую и расслабляющую игру с акцентом на романтические отношения и развитие персонажа.

nice game, but a little annoying that this "year 1" version ends with the game freezing

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