Broken Reality

This is a first-person open-world adventure game based on exploration, environmental puzzles, 3D platforming, and fetch quests. That could describe a lot of games! But what makes this game so riveting is its unique and glitchy visual style, its catchy post-post-modern vaporwave music, and its flat, alienated dialog, which together do a remarkably straightforward job at conveying a contemporary story.

Some people describe the game's topic as being "the Internet", but I think that's wrong. It's about online communication at its most primitive and basic. If you really sink your teeth into it and find all the collectibles, you realize that there's a coherent story underneath. Without spoiling it, I'll just point out that it's about the loss of our naïveté regarding freedom of expression and community in the pre-Internet BBS days. Online life has since become commercial, egotistic, and lonely. It's unfulfilling and often quite ridiculous.

But this sombre, critical core is not its veneer. The game's presentation is bubbly and humorous and mostly fun. Indeed, that jarring discrepancy is itself a symptom of online life, isn't it?

I can't praise everything about Broken Reality. The glitches are not just an intentional: there are actually many bugs, though the devs are very active in trying to squash them all. Also, the late game takes a sharp turn and suddenly becomes frustratingly difficult. This is due to opaque telegraphing of the puzzles (the quest UI disappears) and frustrating time-based 3D platforming.

Still, taken as a whole, this is a memorable and relevant game. Thumbs up.