This Strange Realm of Mine (2017)

A glance at this game looks and sounds really interesting. It's exactly the kind of genre I like (an FPS exploration-focused game that harkens back to the good old days of classic dungeon crawlers before the FPS genre as we know it today emerged)

The game is true to what it represents and often feels like an RPG. for the first 30 minutes I began to wonder if the game was going to go along the route of STRIFE, there is a lot of resemblance. The game also looks very good. It looks like its going for a mix of doom and minecraft (and that's a cool combo) But, there are some issues:

The first one is that this game is not open world at all. the maps are startlingly linear and not very inspired. Several are in fact just big square fields that have enemies in them. Some are just hallways with an NPC you talk to at the end of. All maps are short with a mission of some kind that then progress to the next area. and every area is segregated by this strange 'bar' map that fills with NPCs you come across. You can talk to them or ignore them. I like talking to people in games but for the most part I didn't find any of the characters in this game that interesting to talk to, and that killed the game for me. the linera nature of these maps also kills the feel of what one might hope would turn out to be a legit RPG.

That leaves us with an FPS as you adventure your way from one map to the nexxt... and well, the combat is okay, but its fairly mechanical and not the strong point of the game (or it would seem) I actually found that in the end the combat was the best part of the game. All the quests are very linear and foisted upon the player whether they want to do them or not. Dialogue seems inconsequential what you might actually choose. (there might be alternate paths but the player never gets a sense of agency for what they pick)

The game had okay writing (and there is actually quite a lot of stuff to read in it) and general idea to the story, but it feels a little hollow and the basic premise of the game was not so much my thing you basically are dead and experiencing yourself through other fragmented bits of yourself as a strange means to cope with some difficult experience that is not really fully explained in a VERY schizoid type manner and after three hours of game play the end was really bad, bleh. but maybe it has multiple endings and i got a bad one (not sure why i deserved that!)