I must have got this in a bundle. Dream Quest taught me that a great game can have terrible art, so I gave it a try. It's bad. Stick figures spout boring dialogue based on one of Shakespeare's plays. There's no clever twist. It's just awful.

Paper Shakespeare: Loves Labor(s) Lost 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 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.

Of course this is more than just a bad E-book... it's a cringeworthy, godawfully bad SHAKESPEARE FAN FICTION. That's right, instead of, you know, a Sonic the Hedgehog or a Pokemon or a Star Trek fan fiction, it's directly and unacceptably assaulting the works of William Shakespeare. If his works weren't in the public domain, whoever owned them would sue for defamation, this is that bad. Oh and don't even get me started on the super craptastic MS-Paint drawings that accompany this garbage instead of the usual auto-generated character illustrations... this is so bad it makes me wonder if this is some kind of sick joke at the expense of gamers.

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.

Paper Shakespeare: Loves Labor(s) Lost didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the E-book, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-book didn't really capture any interest from readers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for reading the first chapter, and only around 32 percent of readers bothered to get that far before deleting the E-book, less than half the readers. Hardly a success story, readers just weren't all that interested in the E-book... and that's remarkable. Imagine you wrote a book so bad, 2/3rds of people who tried reading it threw the book out before even getting through the first chapter.... ouch.

Continuing along this line, the poor quality of this E-book is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak reader count was only ONE reader. That's right, only one person ever read this at a time. When I read this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak reader count for the game. OUCH. The only reader activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly deleting it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 ACTUAL games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this E-book is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality E-book seriously, and for good reason.

Paper Shakespeare: Loves Labor(s) Lost is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. 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.

Whack