You CAN judge a book by its cover: AI slop video game guides are a thing
Spoilers: they’re worse than I thought. I also got a refund.
I created the habit of searching Amazon, instead of Google, whenever I get curious about the release date of a game. It’s usually more accurate than Google’s AI overview. In fact, AI being inaccurate will be a theme throughout this story.
First contact
When I searched “Alien Isolation 2” on Amazon, I was surprised by the first result: a guide for a game that, I then learned, you can’t even pre-order yet. Even before clicking on it, it was clear that the cover was AI generated. It’s easy to notice yet hard to explain, but when an image is so evenly contrasted, it’s a sign of AI.
The game guide is purchasable, it’s not a pre order. So if we give it the benefit of the doubt, it could contain spoilers for an unreleased game. In this case though, you can judge a book by its cover, as you can be sure the text inside is as low effort as its paperback.
Let me add some context: Alien Isolation is a horror game from 2014, based on a then-cold(ish) movie franchise. It got a mobile spin off, and a sequel was announced more than a decade after the first game released. It’s kind of a niche game, not gathering much attention at first, then slowly becoming a modern classic. So I was intrigued by it being the center of a new scam I found. Turns out these fake guides are plentiful.
Control Resonant, Gears of War E-Day and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced are some of the yet to be released games that also got their own sloppy guide. All of them with similarly composed and deep fried cover arts, similarly structured text on their cover, and, for the most part, similarly formatted “author” names.
Jerald H. Mullins, George D. Brogan and Donald C. Campbell are the totally legit gamer authors ready to walk you through completing these games. Games that even their own developers haven’t completed yet. And for only 20€ each.
Even the product description is AI generated, as the one for E-Day starts with the first paragraph of the chatbot’s reply.
The curiosity was about to “assassiinate” me, so I ordered two of them. Amazon’s customer service is really flexible, so I know I’m not risking any of my money.
It’s a bad idea, but it’s not a dumb idea
Amazon’s search is finely tuned to make you buy more stuff along with your stuff. It also makes it easily exploitable. If you’re looking for a smartphone, it will suggest you cases. If you’re looking for a watch, watch straps will appear right next to them. Games are always next to game consoles. And naturally, game guides are suggested alongside games.
So when a game is announced, or even rumoured, it’s quite easy to prompt a whole book before the game itself and its official guide are listed. And Amazon makes it easy to self publish it. When the game is finally listed, the fake guide already climbed up the search results, so it’s featured next to the product it’s based off. In the case of E-Day’s, it’s even ranked higher than the official soundtrack.
It’s worse than I thought
I got the books I ordered. The first thing I realised is how the texture on the cover is a dust magnet. It has a coating that never feels nice to the touch and always feels cheap. The printing of the cover “art” is extremely dark, I had to bump up the exposure on the picture above by a lot just to be able to see the slop. Then I realised that the Gears of War E-Day guide has a typo on the title: “Gear of War E-Day”. I took it as a sign that I should skim through this one first.
While the typo on the cover made me chuckle, the first page made me laugh out loud: the font is… a choice, one I doubt was made by a human.
Two pages later there’s a disclaimer that reads like “please don’t sue me”, where Gears of War is actually written correctly this time, which makes me wonder if the previous typos are intentional. Though I doubt the “No infringement was intended” part would hold up in court, as even the game franchise’s logo is printed on the cover.
Then there’s a table of contents, written in Arial, each line formatted as links, and without the page numbers, as I would soon learn, there aren’t page numbers in the entire book.
These two pages tells us a story: half of the guide is just lore, there isn’t a walkthrough to be seen, nothing that actually guides you through the game. Of course I didn’t expect it would guide me through an unreleased game, but I thought it would at least make something up. It didn’t. Instead, it just regurgitated the wiki in book form.
I flipped through the printer paper pages, and there were no images. It’s written and formatted like a novel, and not like a kids novel with colourful images every couple of pages. Here you need to use your imagination.
This AI hallmark literary device is used at least once per page. I stopped looking for them by page 4, or at least I think, since there aren’t any page numbers.
I find it interesting that even when the job the AI was given was to write a guide, it can’t help itself to not sound subversive. It’s a guide written in a subversive tone. It’s like it’s actively trying not to teach me anything until the very end of a sentence, as if it needs punchlines to keep things interesting.
After 60ish pages (again, I don’t know) of lore dump, the chapters of the second half of the book sound way more guide-like. They also sound hilarious to anyone who ever played a Gears of War game:
It’s Gears of War. There aren’t any “survival mechanics” other than getting ammo and not getting shredded by the Locust. There isn’t any “psychological warfare” when I’m cutting the enemies in half with a chainsaw. Sure, there might be some “squad strategy and co-op coordination” for a brief moment, then it all descends into chaos, always. I need to say it again: it’s Gears of War, not Arma. The only “gameplay philosophy” you’ll need are your Doritos hands and Mountain Dew breath, while talking shit with a friend. And you certainly won’t need any “tactical optimisation”. It’s not that deep.
I opened the book somewhere around these chapters, and was faced with two whole pages of text trying to explain, with the most words possible, why taking cover is important. It tries, and fails, to make the simple action of pressing “A” sound like The Art of War. Then there are three pages explaining weapon categories, followed by two and a half pages of “Movement, Positioning and Survival Flow”, whatever that means.
The content of these chapters might as well be Lorem Ipsum.
These games aren’t hard to understand. You’ll never make a hard decision. You go forward, take cover to not die, spend any ammo you have on the aliens, reload, then do it all over again for nine-or-so hours. I just explained in half a paragraph what this guide couldn’t in several pages. AI isn’t capable of just getting to the point. But it’s not like there’s a point to get to. Explaining Gears’ gameplay is useless, the game itself does a great job of tutorializing everything.
While trying to grasp what kind of player would read such a thing, I had a revelation. Everything, from the quality of the cover, the typos, the low effort formatting… it all suddenly made sense: the only function of this book is to be shaped like a book. That’s where the standards of the seller stopped. And their target audience is whoever is gullible enough to unironically buy a guide that looks like this. And they probably won’t return it, as they’ll most likely, unironically, think they’re learning something, instead of realising they’re reading slop and getting a refund. That is, if they even read it.
Self publishing on Amazon is essentially free. Printing and shipping fees are included in the price. And there’s no stock, each book is printed the moment a unit is sold. It’s a no-risk scam. And if someone flags their listing and it gets taken down, they can always prompt another one.
PlayStation Magazines
Before moving to the Alien Isolation 2 guide, let’s remember what good guides are supposed to look like.
As a kid, I got my hands on a PlayStation Magazine that had a walkthrough of inFamous. It had cool images and thoughtful page layouts. I read it like a story. I didn’t have a PlayStation 3 back then, but I sure did experience inFamous through this magazine. I became a fan before even playing the game. I then told my friends all about how awesome Cole and his powers were, as if I just read a comic book. There’s an inherent quality to these walkthroughs. Years later, when I finally got the Sony console, inFamous was my priority one.
Sadly, this magazine was lost to time, but I do still have the E3 2008 issue. It has walkthroughs for Battlefield Bad Company, Wall-e (the PS2 version), Super Stardust HD, God of War 2 and Beyond Good & Evil. And some of them start with a review, so they have the potential to also be interesting for readers that aren’t planning on following walkthroughs.
I know this magazine will serve me well whenever I decide it’s finally time for me to play Beyond Good & Evil. When I inevitably get stuck in a level, it will be neat to consult this old guide instead of searching the solution on YouTube.
These five-or-so-pages-long walkthroughs provide immense value compared to the >180-pages-long sloppy guides I got from Amazon.
Walkthroughless guides can also be awesome
These AI guides aren’t bad because they don’t try to, well, guide me through the games. They’re bad because they have no substance. I do have a couple of walkthroughless guides that are quality. These were pre-order bonuses and ended up being valuable additions to my library.
The Fallout one details the story, world, characters, factions, weapons… for each game of the franchise. Complete with key arts, sprites, and yes, page numbers. It doesn’t have enough concept art for my taste, but hey, it was free. It’s a cool item for any Fallout fan.
The Final Fantasy XV one is more special. It has a lot of concept art, renders, screenshots, a bestiary, interviews and even photos from the production. It’s almost like a souped-up art book. It covers the game itself, the animated movie Kingsglaive, as well as the anime Brotherhood. This is a great companion to the world of Final Fantasy XV, and I feel privileged to have it in my collection.
Back to the horror
I opened the Alien Isolation 2 guide and was greeted with the familiar please-don’t-sue-me disclaimer. Then I got to the “table of contents”, saw the page numbers and thought “good, the standards are higher here”. My optimism was cut short when I started reading the chapter titles. Turns out the AI actually found a way to pad this book even more.
There’s a whole chapter dedicated to system requirements (which aren’t announced yet). There’s one about unannounced DLC. Another talks about mod support. Remember: the game isn’t out yet.
This guide does try to explain some kind of strategy, sometimes, but only through vague advices that range from basic common sense, to useless to whoever is looking at their screen actually playing the game. And it’s all made up.
When I got to the notorious “system requirements” page, I was shocked by the amount of blank space this book manages to fit in between lines. After spending some time reading these guides, I almost forgot what a book is supposed to look like. So I picked up a real book from my library: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, by the real author, Jason Schreier. Comparing how the books use their pages’ real-estate is almost comical. The font size and the margins on these guides are huge. This was either intentional, to make the book look more substantial, or most likely the “author” didn’t really care. A real, immoral, waste of paper.
This got me angry, a sign that it was time to put the book down and get a refund.
Payback
I called Amazon’s customer service. I probably talked way more than I needed to get a refund, “the listing is misleading”, “the guides don’t guide me through anything”, “it’s all meaningless word salad”… Then the agent asked me “would you like me to flag this listing for a review?”. My answer was “yes, of course”.
Two days later, the Alien Isolation 2 guide is still listed, but the Gears guide was taken down. And it got immediately replaced by a new one, without the typo on the cover, which was also taken down.
I don’t think the problem is solved, but it’s reassuring to see how the customer service agents are proactive about this subject, and how fast these fake books get taken down.
Now what’s left for me to do is to decide on what I should spend the 40€ refund I’m getting. Maybe on a real book, like The Art of Alien Isolation… and a sandwich.
UPDATE [03/07/2026 - 20:31]
Got the goods! The art book is amazing. It goes beyond concept art: it shows character renders, WIP versions of assets, wireframes… it even has set photos from Alien (1979) that the artists used as references. It’s one of the best art books in my collection.
The sandwich was alright.
All opinions are my own.