The Bible - yes, the millenia-old book at the heart of the Christian faith - has come to Steam, and while the early reviews are positive, the game's failing to catch on with a larger player base.
The Bible hit Steam on November 14, and is currently enjoying a 'very positive' reception according to user reviews. Reviews call it an "amazing game," an "audiobook presentation of the Bible with a UI and trivia," and the "one visual novel that finally got me to put the beer bottle down". Despite the positive word of mouth, however, the game's peaked at just 43 concurrent players, as SteamDB shows - that's a pretty rough launch even for an indie game, and this one's coming from the biggest publisher in the world: God.
Okay, so jokes aside, it's being published by a studio called Bible Games, which doesn't have a history on Steam and is impossible to Google. A store page link to an official Discord server is broken. A dive into the game's discussion forums will set you wading through a cesspool of nihilistic blasphemies and defensive conservatives.
Just trying to figure out why this release happened is breaking me. Is Bible Games an earnest developer just attempting to put a digital version of the book - similar to plenty of preceding software - on Steam? It's got bonus trivia features, achievements, and full voiceover narration to suggest that some proper effort went into its development.
Or is this release purely for the memes? Are the devs hoping that news writers like me are going to give it a bemused writeup and a link to the store page. I guess if that's it, it's working! The $10 USD from all the players eager to get in on the joke is gonna add up fast.
One note of actually useful information to come out of the sewer of the game's forum - it's apparently developed in Ren'Py, the same visual novel engine that powers games like Doki Doki Literature Club. Ren'Py has also been used to make a hell of a lot of hentai.
I'm sorry, but we're never going to rank The Bible versus Phoenix Wright in our list of the best visual novels.
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