鬼畜大冒险 Gui Chu Da Mao Xian

Chinese meme RPG. Full of humor, but I can't understand some of them that's why I can't get these memes.

鬼畜大冒险 Gui Chu Da Mao Xian is not a game, it's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. The vast majority of this E-book is 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?".

To answer that question: 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 and bad visual novel construction kits is universal.

The plot for this E-book is more amusing than the content, the idea is that you are mysteriously fighting powerful figures (including fascist dictators, as the screenshots will tell you) and must discover why. It's kind of like the plot of Highlander, except really bad.

This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy 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 particular E-Book/CYOA does have some "stats", numbers added to create the illusion of gameplay, but these numbers are less meaningful than the stats in an old Fighting Fantasy novel, and have little bearing on the various E-book endings this visual novel provides. Nobody finished reading a Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because books aren't games. And neither is this.

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.

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.

The E-Book never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this E-Book every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

So, should you buy this E-Book?

鬼畜大冒险 Gui Chu Da Mao Xian is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Note: Due to the very poor quality of the E-Book, all the comedians came out of the woodwork. The vast majority of the English reviews for this E-Book are joke reviews, such as "this game cured my cancer, saved my marriage, changed my life" etc. That gives the E-book a somewhat misleadingly positive score, so as always, use your discretion when deciding whether to buy.

Many of the characters inside the game look familiar. Sometimes a fun game does not need exquisite modeling and realistic painting, as long as there is an interesting idea, it can also bring joy to people.

I have no idea what's going on, but at one point I got into a knife fight with Hitler.

10/10 Would knife fight with Hitler again. XD

じじ