Broken Reality 2000

Hope you like backtracking and replaying incredibly slow parts of the game when it deletes your progress even after a save

I'm not really sure if this is better or worse than the original since I haven't played that in years. Do I have higher standards now? But man, the fetch quests are really getting to me. The humor is so bland. The puzzles (if you want to call them that) are just meaningless busywork. I'm more offended by the crypto nonsense than the booby body pillow. Somehow this game is buggier than the player character's apartment as well.

I would consider the first Broken Reality to be one of my favourite games of all time. This one misses the mark severely. It doesn't capture any of the charm the first game had and is overall just boring and flat. On top of this I got softlocked 4 hours in because an important key item didn't properly get added to my inventory. Also, a ton of bugs, clipping through walls, I had skins collected that don't show up and tools show up in my inventory without ever collecting them. All that being said IT HAS BEEN 8 YEARS since the first game. You'd think the developers would have something impressive to show. And VR has been delayed and may not even release. That's unacceptable given the time this game has been in development. TLDR: The game is soulless and a buggy mess. Play the first game it's actually worth your time.

Broken Reality 2000 fails so much to be a compelling game to me, it makes me question why i even liked the first game to begin with. With how many bad design ideas it takes from the original game, and how it offers nothing new that makes it enjoyable or memorable, im sitting here scratching my head wondering what went wrong here. If you want to feel even worse, a single "unstuck" button update days after launch is what made this game go from a boring slog i completely hated, to a somewhat tolerable experience i could try to cheese at every opportune time the developer decided to lock progression behind random quests i had zero motivation of completing. and even then, i gave up when the game decides that backtracking and going through more different boring zones after you already did 4 or so is a good idea. Broken reality, as a series, hides its flaws behind its artstyle. it worked well in the original, but it fails here. nothing grips you. NPC models and writing are so boring and lame (and it doesn't help they're all glitching through walls.) Music is generic. Humour isn't timely or actually funny. graphics are nostalgia bait with no soul. Maybe you're not here for compelling gameplay. let's say your proposition is getting to oggle at pixel graphics, feel good about yourself, wander around, and do vague cryptic puzzles and backtracking (for some ungodly reason..). It's worse here, by a long shot. I waited for this game forever. I played for nearly 4 hours to convince myself i enjoyed this. but it's not a fun video game, whether you want gameplay or you just want a trippy experience. it's too boring, cryptic, and bugged. and unless the dev decides they want to add 10 more bugs that make speedrunning possible, or a randomizer, or some other pie in the sky thing, this game will not be good. And looking back now, neither game is that good, and i don't know what would fix them. Just get the first game, play it until you inevitably get stuck, and stop there in ignorant bliss. This is sad.

This sucks man I really really wanted to like this game. I loved the first one but from playing this for about an hour it just felt like a mega slog. The characters were fun to talk to and the graphics are nice but walking around and trying to get likes is a completely tedious activity, it becomes a total pain in the ass once you do the first few jobs and then have to go on a scavenger hunt looking for QR codes. I just don't enjoy it.

play the first game instead

Given how aesthetically pleasing and experimental the first game was, this sequel is just hot a$$. Broken (no pun intended), barely a videogame and overstays its welcome. The Y2K aesthetics i've expected to find are simply not there, the story (if you can call it that) is nonexistent. Pretty much every gripe i've had with BR1 is quadrupled here: ♥♥♥♥♥♥ maymay references, lack of polish, bad game design choices. Don't bother.

I always thought that the original Broken Reality was a cult classic. I played that in 2023 and it really stuck with me, especially that game's ending. I've had this title wishlisted ever since and I feel like it was worth the wait for the most part. Firstly, I'm really glad the sequel came out at all and that I got to play it. Hypnospace Outlaw was aesthetically and culturally pretty close to Broken Reality, and when that game's sequel (Dreamsettler) was canceled, I was prepared to accept that Broken Reality 2000 might not be coming out either, since there were a lot of delays, uncertainties regarding the release date and long radio silence from the devs. I think this game could have used a few more weeks or months to polish some areas and issues, but post-launch support from the devs has been great and I didn't encounter anything game-breaking, just some minor bugs. Generally, this game feels like an improvement to the first in *nearly* every way, especially when it comes to gameplay, looks and the general feel. Whereas the first game leaned more into 80/90s aesthetics, this leans more into the Dreamcast/Y2K era. It's been a while since I played the original, so I can't 100% remember, but I'm pretty sure Broken Reality only featured stationary "fake players" (to clarify, both games have quest-giver or named NPCs and then a large amount of player-like NPCs to populate the worlds), the ones in this game walk around, have a lot more dialogue (it takes ages to exhaust their lines in some areas) and feel a lot more alive (they'll react depending how you interact with them). They're kinda like the NPCs in the .hack// games, if you've played those. The humor in this game is a lot more in line with the current times and feels like it'll age less poorly. I still appreciate the very old internet references, but the crypto bro and NFT yacht club stuff was a good callback to things that sprang up in the last couple of years. The rise of influencers and annoying IRL streamers is touched on too, and since this game was in development for so long, I feel like it might've even predicted some things depending on how recently they were added? (There's a segment in the cinema where the entire audience is just watching instagram reels on the big screen, which might've been a joke initially, but is a completely normal thing people just do IRL now because it's stupid and funny?) And while I personally did like these more "modern" references, I feel like it's kind of at odds with the game itself? This wouldn't be an issue if only the aesthetics were Y2K, but this *is* canonically set in the year 1999, no? The game and the characters within it say as much, so how come there's so many things that reference the current times? Is the player character actually someone living in 2026 and NATEM is just a community of larpers that pretend it's actually 1999? I always thought Broken Reality was supposed to be set in an *alternate* interpretation of the internet of that time, kinda like how Serial Experiments Lain does it. Additionally, there were some aspects that really felt like a letdown, even if they don't necessarily outweigh the positives. For starters, the soundtrack for the original Broken Reality was AMAZING (I still have "Domo Paradisso" in my playlist), but in this game the OST and even the sound design in general felt like an afterthought? There's music that just silently cuts out when you move too far away from certain areas, and there's even a few that straight up don't have any music at all, so there's just deafening silence. There's quite a few interactables that don't play the sounds they're supposed to, like a few of the save vending machines. Another thing that bothered me was the entire cloud/ending area. I liked the idea of reverting to previous versions and the "Blender" puzzles, but the part of the true ending where you just slowly walk for like 5 minutes is just a slog for no reason. Maybe it's just my zoomer brain being impatient, but there was a similar part in Broken Reality's ending and it felt a lot more engaging. The original game's ending felt more substantial as a whole, especially the sequence with the "Shutdown" track felt really mesmerizing and is what has stuck with me for so long. I don't hate the ending here and I do appreciate the message it wants to go with, but it feels like there could've been something more grandiose there. I will still definitely be replaying this one, if only to 100% it (still stuck on the pyramid achievement), and if this game eventually gets trading cards and such I'll probably get the badges for it aswell. I think Steam Points Shop items especially would do this game a lot of good and give it some exposure (animated vaporwave/Y2K backgrounds pretty much always end up on the forefront of the Points Shop and at least some players do check out the games they're from), since for now it seems like the release went under the radar for some, and the aesthetic this series has nailed so well is wasted on the generic vaporwave asset flips Steam is saturated with. All in all, this still feels like a good sequel to the original. I'm not sure if Dynamic Media Triad will feel like a third game is worth their time depending on how well this does, but I would still 100% play that or really anything similar they put out next. You guys have a knack for this genre, even if it goes unappreciated