Warning: Review Manipulation![www.ftc.gov]

This product features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after this launched on Steam, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.

Due to the 2024 FTC ruling (16 CFR Part 465), these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law.

Undying Symphony is only barely 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.

Now in fairness there's a few awful, badly made and likely reskinned demo minigames here, all of which are terrible quality.

This e-book is unlike most e-books on Steam, being simple high school anime club fan-fictions about the author's imaginary girlfriend. And how I wish I could be reviewing one of those instead of this.

Instead, we have a bunch of Russian political and military propaganda desperately trying to rephrase the context of the German invasion of the USSR in World War 2 such that it supports and attempts, desperately and pathetically, to justify current Russian aggression and war crimes.

As always, it's my firm believe that politics and political agenda have no place in gaming. Especially not when this agenda is directly in support of evil, war crimes, and despotic regimes responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And, like all propaganda, there's astroturfed reviews inflating the popularity of the toxic message.

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 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 10 concurrent readers, and those were the Russian fake review accounts. This is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. I'm glad that their attempt to spread political propaganda on Steam has failed.

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. It's definitely impossible for me to recommend you touch this toxic political propaganda.