Sword Daughter Reviews

Sword Daughter is an older E-Book from 2015, itself a "remaster" of a 1980's Choose Your Own Adventure style book. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. Sword Daughter 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 short passages of rather mediocre "sword & sorcery" 1980's pulp writing. The original CYOA book this is derived from never reached the same levels of popularity as Jackson and Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy game books, or the official Choose Your Own Adventure branded books, either. This somewhat mediocre re-imagining of the E-book doesn't improve things... heck, even the art assets are delivered poorly at just 480p resolution. It's 2025, guys. Come on. 1992 called, they want their graphics resolution back. 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. One of the chief problems with 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. Sword Daughter 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 "With A Kiss", takes just a few minutes or one readthrough of this short CYOA, trivial to get, but less than 30 percent of readers bothered to get that far before uninstalling the E-Book. Hardly a success story, even the people who own this E-Book weren't interested in it. 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. Sword Daughter has the almost scam-like price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

I understand this is an adaptation of an old "choose your own adventure" book. I LOVED those in the 80s! So coming from this mindset and with the beautiful graphics and soundtrack they put this in, I will give it a "thumbs up". Otherwise you might be disappointed because it is very short and some scenes/changes in feeling come very abruptly. You can't really compare it to a modern VN, so keep that in mind!