Broken Reality

helllll of a lot of backtracking.

had an item clip into the ground in a way that disabled my ability to interact with it, softlocking me

neat environments at least

This game is pretty cool, although what I'd describe as an utterly dissociative experience. I've only finished the first area but it's suddenly gotten creepy, although there was an oddly suspenseful vibe throughout so far. Delightful satire of many aspects of old (and modern) internet culture. I am no expert in vaporwave so I can't comment on that, but I enjoyed this. The only complaints I have are some of the puzzles require a lot of confusing back-tracking for which the map is not very helpful (since nothing in this game is labeled except some of the shops), and the controls are wonky (but that's partially my hatred of this Unity thing where the mouse controls the camera, since I'm not that dexterous with the mouse). Also, I wish you could change hte controls in the menu from WASD to arrow keys because I'm left-handed. Can't wait to see how this game ends!

My thumbs up for this is more of a tentative recommendation as only a select type of user would enjoy a game like this. First of all, this game is an Adventure game, and not a walking simulator as many reviews like to claim. Narrative is extremely deemphasized in favor of using the tools that the game gives you to interact with the environment and complete quests for NPCs. When I say 'quests' I really mean 'sidequests' as this game's progression is built entirely on earning Likes to become popular enough to progress to the next area. When the game briefly does touch on the main story it's cryptic and doesn't really wind up affecting much.

The gameplay itself is fun, though it would wear out its welcome were the game any longer. While most of it is recognizing which tool to use on which obstacle, the process of doing so is stimulating for a while. There's also a surprising amount of movement based challenges centering on the Hyperlink (basically a grappling hook) which up in complexity as the game goes on. It won't blow your socks off or anything, but it will keep you entertained as you continue through the game's world.

The real strength of Broken Reality is the atmosphere and music. As you can probably see from the screenshots this game oozes the low-fi vaporwave aesthetic, and it's absolutely drenched in early internet vibes and meme culture from the 2000s. Expect many, many dated jokes that will make you wither to dust if you actually get them. However, it does its job with that very ethereal and very relaxing mood that vaporwave eschews, at least until it briefly dips its toes into horror at the very end of the game. This would be a very good game to play while high. So, if that sounds like your thing, then give it a shot. However, if you're someone who requires action, or a sensible story at the very least, then stay away from this one. It will only frustrate you.

Heads up, this game does contain rapidly flashing colors in the ending sequence so be aware of that if you are photosensitive.

What's the Gameplay?

How About the Aesthetics & Vibes?

What to Watch Out For?

Recommended?

i got to the ending segment and the credit card glitched on me so the ending sequence and cutscene was 40 minutes long , pretty good

Literally one of the most interesting walking simulators

Industrial music made me trans 10/10

Very good and very nice and good

Beautiful visuals. Unique, relaxing worlds that are a trip to walk-through and experience. Worth it if it's on sale.. Come relax and get lost in some Waporwaves!

If the idea of exploring a vaporwave world appeals to you at all, buy this.

It's an exploration game at its core (I refuse to use the term "walking sim," dumbest genre tag ever). But it has some clever light gameplay ideas that keep the player engaged, so it never feels like you're just holding the W key and looking around. And it's just dripping with vibes at every turn.

A beautiful love letter to Vaporwave art, culture, memes, and music.

cant recommend enough, a very immersive exploration sim with amazing visuals. fun mechanics and puzzles. buy it now!!!

a nice homage to the internet of old.
wish it had achievements. even if I don't normally do stuff specifically for achievements, I do like it when a game has them.
cool concept overall, a singleplayer game pretending to be multiplayer.

Amazing

This game rules.
A sequel is on the way, and I can't wait for it.
The soundtrack on this game is amazing. Some nice creepy moments scattered into an otherwise humorous nostalgia-fueled trip.
The soundtrack on this game is nuts.
I love the moment you enter into the world. The dial-up glitching was one of the coolest sound design and music production things I have heard in recent memory.
Hell, I still remember it and I'm writing this review almost a year after I first picked up this game.

Broken Reality is a surrealistic vaporwave fueled fever dream that embraces the absurdity of a capitalistic hellscape, the aesthetics perfectly encapsulates a time long forgotten, an amalgamation of nostalgia and colors that bombard all the visual senses. Playing through this game was a magical time.

So how's the gameplay? It's a first person Collect-a-Thon wrapped in rouge-lite mechanics, puzzles and mini games, difficulty ranges from enjoyable to tedious at times but that's only cause my smooth brain gets easily fried by math equations and mundane tasks. Jokes aside, the strong presentation and memorable scenery kept me going just to see what else wacky stuff the game was going to throw at me.

If you're someone who enjoys vaporwave culture, memes and a heavy dose of sensory overload with a pretty simple and chill gameplay that doesn't require you to stress, this should feel like home.

I give this game eight doges out of ten.

no invert mouse option

this is one of my favourite games of all time, especially visually. the story, while simple, is quite powerful and its art style is 100% my favourite out of any game ive ever played. please play this

This is such a good Collectathon game but it doesnt have what a collectathon NEEDS.
Achievements.
There's tons of things they could've made achievements for and yet they didn't.
they have multiple little side minigames that achievements would work for and yet, none.
My disappointment is immeasurable, but my experience is still chill af.

This is an awesome exploration game with cool map designs and broken textures that I wouldn't expect to see anywhere, but they work here because the game is teeming with glitch effects and old tech shenanigans for its theme. It's a homage to the Internet in its early days and it's littered with all sorts of beautiful references to meme culture and some more obscure sides of the Internet.
I really enjoyed just exploring around and finding all the hidden stuff in all the nooks and crannies of the maps, even in the most unreachable areas where I thought I had broken the game's boundaries and reached a spot I'm not supposed to get to, there was always a little something waiting for me. It was cool.
While I thoroughly enjoyed playing and exploring the game, and I highly recommend playing it, I also thought that as it went on it kinda got dragged and lost some of its charm. The later areas felt a bit forced or uninspired in comparison to the first area, which is full of interesting details and areas to explore. Each different area of the game has its own theme and architectural designs, but none compare to the level of polish and detail that the first area has. It kinda started to feel a bit lacking at some point and I had to force myself to finish the game because although I wanted to, I didn't feel interested enough to do so.
I still think it's a wonderful exploration game and it has a respectable amount of content for what it is, so I highly recommend playing it, not necessarily to finish but rather to enjoy the worlds this game has to offer, until you get bored.

I enjoyed this game. Quite a bit. But I can only really reccomend it if you think you really enjoy the aesthetic and vibe, because that is BY FAR it's strongest offering. The visuals are lovely, I appreciated it's unique art direction from start to finish.

The rest is a mixed bag. The gameplay loop is just okay, it's a bit repetitive, and fairly shallow. Nothing groundbreaking or interesting in terms of gameplay. Story is obtuse, kind of a mess, but interesting enough.

Honestly though my biggest gripe is that the performance is BAD, I suspect little to no optimization was done to make this run well. It's very graphically simple but I was regularly dipping sub 50 and in the final area of the game I had a hard time reaching above 40fps. My pc isn't crazy but I can run most modern graphically intense games at 60fps on low settings at least. So stay away if you have a low spec pc.

Hits a lot of nice nostalgia notes for me, regarding weird mid-90's 3D collectathons, especially after I'd unlocked the katana and started slashing popup ads, or figured out the shopping and photo minigames. I'd call this a firm thumbs-sideways though.

For the negatives: Beware the backtracking, a few specific one-way doors make it perilously easy to have to redo a zone, and some of the hidden items are real awkward to get. Also, the game technically works on Linux, but badly enough that the final levels may not be completable through the lag. I'll have to play it again on windows to verify if it's finishable there. I think the interface/controls could have been tweaked to be a little smoother, as well - there's never a situation where multiple inventory items can be used on the same object, so why force the player to swap between inventory items instead of just automatically choosing the correct one if you have it? That would have saved me from a few times when I got stuck, because I didn't realize which tool it wanted me to use on which unlabled world object.

...but, the scenery is beautiful, the story's alright, and I like the sense of humor. Everything relating to the camera is also cool as hell.

I haven't beat the game yet, but I have played for 4.20 hours and for this game, that seems like a good place to stop

No options menu of any kind and poor performance make this game nearly unplayable. Not even the bare minimum of changing mouse sensitivity is possible. My computer can run modern games with graphics on high, but for some reason the framerate is unstable stutters all the time. This is even worse since there's so graphics settings to lower things individually. The only graphics options you get are the unity launch window presets that don't tell you what they change, and resolution which doesn't actually change the game's resolution.

I could continue playing this game at an incredibly uncomfortable sensitivity and ugly graphics, but I'd rather have fun by playing a different game.

This game is one of the coolest experiences ever. It's insanely fun and relaxing. I bought it on sale but I would've paid full price for it.

I don't exactly know what this is, but it is good.

It's not exactly a game, nor is it a walking simulator. It feels like a portal into another world, a feeling I have not felt in a long time from a game.

I say it isn't a walking simulator, because the abilities provided make the game way more fun than most. The first section feels like a whole game, but then you enter the hub and everything feels so much more massive.

This game caught me off guard because of this. I thought it would be a small, 1 hour experience. But I was given this sprawling world to explore.

You slowly get your abilities in the first world, and then you have the entire rest of the game to apply them. This feels simply amazing, and never got stale for me. It felt like instead of having to give me new ones to keep it interesting, the game just kept finding new uses for them. Superb design.

It is not grounded in reality (perhaps because it is broken, ha!). It is its own strange world. It feels familiar to me, mostly because I was really into vaporwave in middle school. Had I found this game earlier, I would have never shut up about it and made it my whole personality.

It is sombre, and quite most of the time. The atmosphere of these places you are exploring is the meat of it. Tying it together are little stories. Side quests, some overarching stuff, and of course, the cryptic indie game finale.

It is referencing both real world things, and things that I either don't remember, or things that I just forgot.

It is a strange piece of art. You are place into a world to explore, and you just do so. Nothing else, nothing less.

9.5/10. There are one or two frustrating moments, but nothing a quick search can fix. Ultimately, this game delivers on providing access to another world, and is something I feel everyone should at least try.

I'm not the biggest fan of collect-a-thons or the post-ironic vaporwave aesthetic, but this has some interesting puzzles and the visuals are impressive - even if they sometimes make me feel like I'm drinking straight triple-sec while staring at webcore edits

There's a lot to like about this, but there's also some issues I had too.

The Good:

• Style - Absolutely phenomenal
  
• Music - Not as memorable as some other games, but pretty good still
  
• Levels - Each level is entirely unique to the others. My favorites were Domo Paradiso and The Love Cruise.
  

• Gameplay - All you abilities get introduced in the tutorial and don't get much expanded by much across the game. This lead to the gameplay loop getting stale, as the game only changes things up by making it harder to spot what to do next.
  
• Dialogue - Most characters don't speak to you, and the ones that do sometimes speak in broken English making it hard to understand them.
  

[*] Story - What's presented in Dom Paradiso seems interesting, as it hints at some drama between the creators of the Net having a falling out. This gets expanded upon in a very cryptic way once you hit the Aquanet, but then gets dropped until you get to the end of the game. At that point, it's not clear what exactly is going on, or what anyone is talking about. But apparently this can be hand-waved away as it's all up to interpretation, according to the developer.

A fun collect-a-thon that quickly devolves into a mind numbing slug fest after the first level. Seeing all the cool, pretty, funny, and nostalgic sights is not enough to keep me engaged for the HOURS you are required to waste walking so slowly to click all the things and explore every single square inch of every level several times over. The depressing endgame content was made to serve as some kind of message instead of a satisfying reward and sours everything before it. I wish I could like this game and there was clearly a ton of time and effort spent creating the levels, which actually ended up ruining the game for me because the devs thought players should be forced to scour every square inch of these levels in order to progress at all.

Good game if you like exploring, simple quests and puzzles. Beautiful weird game to look at

Peak A E S T H E T I C S in this game. Baller soundtrack. Fun and accessible gameplay. Not much to complain about side from some minor bugs.

Love the visuals, music, and game play. Story is okay, but what really annoys me is all the bugs and glitches. I'd still recommend this game, just try to save often.

Very trippy, surreal and beautiful visuals. Great side story. Fun gameplay and lots of secrens and easter eggs. My all time favorite game.

I wish the internet was real. . .

What an amazing game, more people should check it out !!!

It's a neat game, if you want a puzzle + vaporwave chill like game, this would be good for you.

It's surreal
It's cryptic
It's peak

I appreciate the effort but this is just a worse executed Jazzpunk. Just a lot of walking back and forth with increasingly boring puzzles. Many times the road to progression was hidden and eventually I just gave up and didn't bother with a guide. The aesthetics are definitely very pleasing but definitely fully fleshed out, like it was ashamed of fully realising it's identity. Even though I gave up relatively early on, i'm eager to see what else this studio will come out with next. This isn't it, though

brings me back to 2012-2015, snipars, macintosh plus, yung lean, fiji water and arizona tea. It was such a defining era for me. Great game. The walking is a little slow, but that's its only draw back.

fun

You should know if you want to play this game just by looking at it, why are you reading this?

A good, relaxing time. Reminiscent of a 90's adventure game.

What a fun game and I bought it because of the vaporwave aesthetics and the fond memories I had in an era when it was popular. The playthrough, chanllenges, quests etc. It was all very fun and laid back which is always nice. Man, the ending! The ending was WOW.

very webcore 10/10

yeah just gonna shoot this game directly into my veins real quick

Good to play when you have nothing else to play. I really like the artwork

Very amateurish, but endearing. The gameplay is meandering at best, the writing is just a little off, the visuals are half-baked, and the storyline is straight out of a 10 year olds fantasy. Yet this game still manages to come to a conclusion that feels like a proper send off. Had a blast playing this despite all its flaws, and would definitely recommend it to people who just enjoy the art form that is video games.

The vaporwave art style looked cool at first, but the gameplay was so boring it almost gave me brain damage.

I really loved this game, I still go back and play it over again because I love it so much. I cannot wait for Broken Reality 2000

Amazing, unique game. Fun, chill (for most part), very creative, beautiful visuals and music, great soundtrack.

Fond memories and eager for Broken Reality 2000, 9.5/10 for this genre and price range.