Broken Reality (2018)

I've seen this game recommended to fans of Hypnospace Outlaw, but the similarities are only skin-deep. While Outlaw's gameplay takes place in a faux-desktop and web browser, Broken Reality is a first-person "walking simulator" with puzzles, platforming and adventure elements.

It works better than I expected. Each of the game's areas are distinct in flavor and mechanics. The items you unlock are generally fun to use, and I enjoyed a lot of the puzzles and combing every polygon for secrets. The art and music, abrasive at first, grew more beautiful to me over time.

I felt a bit let down by the game's final area. The barren environments were tough to distinguish, and lines of sight for the "hyperlink" mechanic became really obscure... when I eventually looked up a walkthrough, my reaction was "really?" Also, it wasn't clear to me what Broken Reality was trying to say with its ending, at least in comparison to other titles I've played that attempt something similar.

BR consists of several areas with a different theme for you to wander around and explore. The puzzles get in a bit annoying towards the end. For whatever reason i found this fell a little flat. Everything in this game looks really good though, and there are little bits of music scattered into different areas as you move into them it sets a new tone.

Maybe the best way to describe the game is a kind of interactive exploratory shopping mall simulator with some other differently themed places (and a few secrets) The neat thing is the art and how different facets of 'web 2.0 culture' are made manifest such as these 'doot doot skeletons' which form a mariachi band in a cyberpunkish style city.

Was overall a decent experience, (just know it's a walking sim and don't get too excited by the sound of the extras or the visual style of the game)

A weird, intensely charming little vaporwave indie game worshipping at the altar of mid-late 90s internet that turned out to have much more going on than I expected. What could have been just a walking simulator (kind of what I expected and would’ve been fine with) turned into what is, essentially, a metroidvania without enemies with a few light zelda-esque puzzles thrown in for good measure. You get various tools that allow you to get to places you previously couldn’t, and at least in one instance you’ll have to return to an earlier level to get everything. You get a grappling hook, a katana that cuts through malware and popup ads, a camera, a glitch lens for the camera that allows you alter the environment and see through fake walls and illusions such, and a mark/recall compass that lets you teleport to a previously selected location. Most of the puzzles involve the mark/recall compass and/or glitch lens.

The crux of the game is exploring the environment, looking for people to talk to and things to interact with. People give you quests to go find stuff or take pictures of things or do a little minigame or something. All of this is in the service of getting likes, which you need a certain amount of to unlock new areas.

As far as indie vaporwave titles that steep themselves in geocities era internet culture go, I enjoyed this a smidge more than Hypnospace Outlaw. That game has slapping music and is a more faithful recreation of the early web since it's actual webpages you navigate through rather than a weird VR MMO interpretation of it, but I just didn’t enjoy actually playing it very much and didn’t really enjoy the puzzles. I resorted to a walkthrough about halfway through because I was ready for it to be over but still wanted to see how the story shook out. This game is kinda the reverse, I enjoyed playing it and just wandering around these cool looking environments, but there really wasn’t a coherent story pushing me through as far as I could tell, just little hints of background about this place and a vague sense of unease and that something isn’t right, until the ending happens which is just honestly one of the coolest and most visually stunning endings to a video game.